Students Shiver In Washington, DC Schools
Accuweather says that Washington, DC weather is currently pretty cold, but will be warming up a bit later in the week. Which is a good thing, since Washington area school heating systems are breaking down left and right. Despite millions of dollars invested during the 1990s in new heating systems, the school district's abject failure to do routine maintenance has caused the expensive systems to fail in many schools. The damage is so bad that many of the systems are a complete loss. Water treatment for all of the district's boilers would have cost around $100,000 per year. Instead they have spent more than $100 million in emergency repairs.
The Army Corps of Engineers came to the District in the late 1990s on an expensive mission: launch a massive overhaul of decrepit school buildings, which eventually included spending $80 million to replace ancient heating systems with brand-new boilers to last 25 years or more.
Since then, 40 of the 55 renovated heating systems have broken down or needed major repair. Public schools officials failed to maintain the new equipment, leading to problems such as damage from mineral deposits that built up because the water was not properly treated, repair records and interviews show.
It would have cost just $100,000 a year to remove harmful minerals from the water flowing into all of the more than 400 boilers in the public schools. But maintenance officials say there was never enough money for it in their budget.
As a result, heating systems old and new have been breaking down all over the school district. Administrators had to sink more than $10 million into emergency repairs this year alone, prompted by cold classrooms at 71 schools in February that displaced hundreds of children.
The failing boilers are a testament to the school system's longstanding inability to keep its buildings in shape or make the best of huge infusions of money. This decade, records show, the schools have spent more than $116 million to replace or overhaul heating and air-conditioning units, including the Army Corps projects. This winter, officials trucked in temporary boilers for seven schools where the systems have failed.
Read it all. It is a testament to the absolute inability of the local government in Washington to exercise any kind of intelligent management to the upkeep of the infrastructure. But then, the tax office in Washington, DC could not keep an eye on something like $30 million that was embezzled by employees recently, either. Chief Financial Officer, Natwar M. Gandhi, called those thefts "immaterial" when they were discovered. Just $100,000 of that stolen money could have averted $116 million in additional waste. Read the whole thing - it will enrage you when you read how badly maintained the Washington schools are. Despite huge influxes of tax money, they can't keep the buildings in reasonable working order.
By NortonPete, Wednesday, 2 January , 2008 @ 6:15 pm
This is obviously mismanagement of the maintenance of these boilers but I see something else in the finger pointing. It looks like the providers of these boilers are refusing to warranty them because of lack of maintenance, I don’t blame them.
But larger commercial cast iron boilers are not totally destroyed by hard water, their controls are, which are expensive. There are chemicals that can restore a boiler but the costly controls must be replaced, so someone is finding a loophole on the warranty.