Temperatures rose at the STLCC Cosand Center after an air conditioning malfunction forced an evacuation of the building.
Kurt Oberreither
-News Editor-
At approximately 3:45 p.m. on Thursday, July 21, the St. Louis Fire Department firefighters were dispatched to theCosand Center at 300 S. Broadway, St. Louis, Mo. following a triggered fire alarm.
Firefighters swept the building with heat-detecting devices and found a ruptured air conditioner coolant pipe on thefifth floor; they determined the fractured pipe had triggered the alarm and no one was injured.
“They isolated the problem and reset the alarm system, but it was pretty minor,” Captain Dan Sutter, public relationsofficer said.
Furthermore, temperatures rose to 104 degrees Fahrenheit on the third floor where the college’s core informationsystems are located. Technology and Education Support Services (TESS) shut down the district’s systems includingBanner, Banner Self-Service, BlackBoard, the public website, email and telephone to protect loss of data.
“The main stuff is here,” DeLancey Smith, Cosand Center director of communications, said. “It was important toavoid losing data so they shut down systems.”
Air conditioner service personnel arrived at approximately 6 p.m. and began restoring the cooling system operation.All core systems were restored by 10 p.m.
“When you turn off hardware for a system that has been running for three years straight, they don’t tend to workright away,” Smith said.
