Huge kudos to our VPFO teams’ teamwork and dedication in ensuring the university community’s safety as high temperatures soared across BC over the past weekend.
Last week a heat warning was issued for Metro Vancouver due to hot and humid temperatures. As a result, the cooling systems in several buildings on the UBC Vancouver Point Grey campus simply could not handle these extreme conditions.
We are proud to see our VPFO teams come together and step up to ensure that vital infrastructure housed within these buildings was safe, research equipment was undamaged by the high heat, critical IT systems continued to function, animals housed in these buildings were safe, and important events scheduled in these facilities could proceed as planned.
Your teamwork, creativity, and resilience speak to our values in the VPFO Strategic Plan, and certainly embodies Strategic 2: Advance our culture of service, stewardship and continuous improvement in our strategic directives.
We would like to specifically thank and acknowledge the teams that worked to solve these cooling problems:
- Facilities – Building Operations for working to get the mechanical systems operating again. Many teams were involved, and we would like to thank the Electricians, Mechanical Technical Specialists, Mechanical Trades Managers, Millwrights, Operations Centre, Operating Engineers, Plumbers, Sheetmetal, and Steamfitters.
- Facilities – Custodial Services for helping with the AMS Nest repairs to ensure our teams could work despite the nesting seagulls in the building.
- Facilities – Customer Services & Informatics for keeping building occupants informed of the situation and helped communicate which systems were most important. Thank you to all the Facilities Managers and the Service Centre.
- Facilities – Energy & Water Services for keeping the controls working and giving vital feedback on how hot/cool spaces were. Thank you to the Building Management Systems team.
- Finance & Operational Excellence for helping to expedite the procurement of the parts needed to repair our systems, especially for the Life Sciences Centre. Thank you to the central procurement team.
- Safety & Risk Services for assessing the situation for elevated risk and helping with the flow of information to evaluate the need to activate the Emergency Operations Centre.
Thank you again for all you do to get us through this challenging time.