Watching the Water: ORNL teams monitor critical systems around the clock

There are roughly 17 miles of steamline running through ORNL’s campus, connecting to every building in both valleys. 

In a control room on the second floor of a building in the center of Bethel Valley, mechanical utilities operator Nathan Chancey monitors them all.

Surrounded by 28 monitors, on a recent night, Chancey watched for irregularities and listened for alarms. Anything out of the ordinary would prompt action from Shift A, one of four teams of six mechanical utilities operators who, with supervisor Tony Walker, rotate between day and night shifts. 

“I think it would be easy to feel insignificant, especially when you first start,” Chancey said, “but then you realize nobody out here does anything if we’re not here. Nobody has water, nobody has heat, nobody can go to the bathroom if we’re not here.”

There’s always a shift watching the lab’s water system, 24 hours a day. Besides manning the central control room, operators sample and test the chemical composition of water in the lab’s boilers, adjusting it when necessary. They monitor the water level in more than 100 pits around campus, ensuring it doesn’t rise enough to cover pipes and cause condensation that could lead to a dangerous water hammer. They watch the lab’s chillers, making sure the water is at the perfect temperature for supercomputers, other computer labs, delicate scientific instruments. If it’s off, it could cause damage.

“We’re responsible for everything up to the building, and into the mechanical room in a lot of places,” Walker said.

And they respond to unexpected situations: a leak detected on a lab floor, a traffic accident that could affect the system, a valve left open – even, as happened a few months ago, an issue at the Y12 tank that could have affected all the lab’s water. That necessitated a sharp cutdown in the lab’s water usage for a few days.

Walker, who’s been a supervisor with the lab for 15 years, said the same processes happen on day and night shift – the main difference is the number of people around. It affects the steam needed to keep temperatures comfortable in buildings where people are working, and it affects the number of requests.

“There’s so much going on during the day,” he said. “It’s a little more laid-back on night shift. You’ve got more time to think about the next problem and the best way to go about correcting it.”

It helps that there’s good backup – numerous people he can call anytime for help or expertise – and a safety culture that permeates from the top down. If so much emphasis weren’t put on doing work safely, he said, “the type of work we do, we’d have a whole lot more injuries.” 

Walker’s team is multidisciplinary, with a variety of educational degrees and certifications and experience in chemical technology, boilers, chillers, electronics, maintenance and other skills. Their job is to find out what’s causing a problem and fix it if possible, or contain it and work around it if it’s something that needs to be done by a union craft worker.

“You can do a little bit of anything you want to here – valve troubleshooting, electronics troubleshooting,” Walker said. “When you’ve got a multicrafted operations team behind you, it makes it a lot easier to problem-solve. The maintenance workers fix it, but our voices are heard – they listen to us.”

Team members are cross-trained to operate every utility system and to rotate through the different duties. Laron Herron came to ORNL from Chicago with a chemical plant/boiler background. On this particular night, he was testing the chemical composition of water samples from the boilers, giving direction if the levels needed to be adjusted – “my expertise,” he said.

But on his next shift, he would be the “truck man,” collecting the samples and monitoring pits.

“You don’t ever get bored,” Herron said.

UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit energy.gov/science. – Kristi L. Bumpus