Students living in residence halls, IMA-goers and those working in on-campus buildings, including the UW Medical Center, enjoyed hot showers and heated rooms Saturday despite a major leak in a pipe that provides water to boilers in the UW’s Central Steam Plant on campus.

The leak, a result of a breach in a pipe installed in 1967, initially threatened to shut down the entire facility for a five-hour period Saturday.

“The University of Washington Central Steam Plant (Seattle campus only) must perform an emergency shutdown and repair of the campus steam system,” wrote Charles Kennedy, associate vice president of Facilities Services, in an e-mail to the university community last Thursday. “This shutdown will result in a complete loss of steam supply for building heat, hot water and other processes that use steam. ... No opportunity for postponement or ‘work-around’ is available.”

However, ingenuity provided by repair crews under the direction of Mark Kirschenbaum, assistant director of Campus Utilities, allowed for the pipe to be repaired without shutting down operations or cutting off steam to any part of the campus.

“The biggest complication was the asbestos insulation around the leak area,” Kirschenbaum said.

Because the pipe segment being repaired was installed more than 40 years ago, it was completely encased in asbestos, which meant an asbestos abatement crew was needed to come in to remove the casing and monitor asbestos levels in the affected area.

“Since it was a water leak, and asbestos isn’t airborne when it’s wet, there really wasn’t much of a concern for asbestos contamination,” Kirschenbaum said.

Once the crew had access to the pipe, they were able to begin repairs on the leak that was letting through 100 gallons of water per minute.

In order to keep water moving into the boilers located above the leak, the crew staged their work in 20-minute intervals, allowing the tanks above the leak to fill up enough to sustain operations between periods when the pipe was being repaired.

“We basically had a three-inch hole, and we rammed a wood plug into it,” Kirschenbaum explained. “At that point it became a controllable leak, and we could still divert all the water we needed to keep the plant running while we were doing our repairs.”

The new pipe segment that was installed Saturday still has to be insulated and will be updated with a calcium silicate insulation block, as asbestos is no longer used in the United States.

Updating old equipment in the facility is an ongoing and expensive challenge, as some of the current equipment was installed as far back as 1948. Kirschenbaum explained that old pipes and equipment needing replacement is not an uncommon issue, although most problems don’t involve pipe systems as sensitive as the one that burst this past week.

“We have a steady process going at a regulated pace to replace old equipment, but we’re talking tens of millions of dollars to replace whole sections of the plant at once,” Kirschenbaum said.

In addition to routine repairs and replacements, the Central Steam Plant completed a major upgrade to its city water lines during the summer and now has an emergency lake-water system installed so the facility can draw water from Lake Union to keep other campus facilities running if an earthquake or other catastrophe occurs and damages city water lines.

Reach news editor Casey Smith at news@dailyuw.com. Photo editor Cliff Despeaux contributed to this story.