When Winter Storm Fern swept through North Texas in late January, bringing 58 consecutive hours of below-freezing temperatures and wind chills as low as -5 degrees Fahrenheit, UTD faced a crisis that has rippled through its research programs for weeks to come.
In a virtual town hall held Feb. 16, university officials detailed the extensive damage to the Bioengineering and Sciences Building and Natural Science and Engineering Research Laboratory — ruptured water lines, flooded cleanrooms and 97 labs rendered partially or fully inoperable — while fielding questions from frustrated and anxious faculty members.
The storm, which shut down campus from Jan. 23 through 29, caused heating coil ruptures in ceiling fan units and variable air volume reheat boxes throughout both buildings, according to Vice President and Chief of Operations Rafael Martín. Water poured into BSB’s cleanroom, research labs, office suites and individual offices. NSERL saw water damage across all four floors, with seepage into the basement.
For Joseph Pancrazio, vice president for research and innovation, the moment of discovery was visceral.
“I saw the cleanroom and my heart just absolutely sank,” Pancrazio said. “It just absolutely sank, and I know that that impacted so many people in our group. The sense of a setback, the sense of goals, of projects, of students delayed — all of this is something that was deeply felt.”
‘We all feel this can’t happen again’
The damage unfolded over several days. On Sunday, Jan. 25, heating coils ruptured in the chemistry suite on the third floor of BSB and in a chemical storage room on the second floor, with water migrating downward to impact suites on the second and first floors. The following day, heating coil failures spread across NSERL, affecting floors one through four and the basement.
Later that day, officials discovered damage to chilled water coils in an air handler unit on the roof of BSB’s western wing, causing water intrusion on floors one through four. The unit remains offline, limiting climate control in spaces west of the BSB lobby and rendering fume hoods in that area unusable.
“We all feel this can’t happen again, and we’re going to do everything in our power to try to make sure it doesn’t,” Pancrazio said. “You know that the university has your back. If you’ve lost equipment, you know that we’re there to make it right.”
Martín said that as of Feb. 13, fourth-floor lab repairs in BSB are near completion, with work on floors one through three ongoing. Drying and treatment efforts are expected to be complete by March 2, with repairs to drywall, ceiling tiles and flooring finished by March 4. In NSERL, mitigation is projected to wrap up by March 10, with repairs complete by March 12.
About 80% of spaces in both buildings are now operational, Martín said. The remaining 20% include 10 heavily-damaged labs in BSB and another 87 moderately-impacted labs across both buildings. The cleanroom, a core research facility, remains closed, though equipment testing is underway and officials hope to reopen it this week.
Why did this happen?
According to Martín, Atmos Energy lowered natural gas supply to industrial users across North Texas during the storm, forcing the university to switch from natural gas to diesel fuel for its boilers. Diesel is less efficient, and the extremely cold temperatures lowered the temperature of water entering the boilers — a combination that compromised the central energy plant’s capacity to protect against freezing.
In the BSB air handler unit, outside air dampers — panels designed to close during below-freezing temperatures — froze open. An issue the building’s management system failed to recognize.
“We will be engaging outside engineers and contractors to help us do a more thorough analysis of what went wrong to help inform what we should do in the future to prevent this from happening again,” Martín said.
Preliminary action items for the future include reducing the temperature across campus during extended cold periods to conserve heating capacity, developing protocols for physical inspections of rooftop units during frozen precipitation and exploring remote inspection options.
Longer-term fixes under consideration include installing electric preheaters in rooftop air handler units — which essentially function as industrial space heaters — and adding variable speed drives to NSERL exhaust fans to better regulate cold air intake.
‘We shouldn’t have to prepare’
When faculty member Chris Brewer asked what steps the university took to prevent the damage and whether it was fully preventable, Martín said that personnel had been positioned on campus to respond to emergencies during the storm by doing regular walks through the research buildings, a move that limited what could have been far worse destruction.
“I’d like to say that we could completely prevent something like this,” Martín said. “I’ve been around long enough to know that I don’t want to make absolute guarantees. But we will take this as a learning experience and put new resources in place that will hopefully reduce the risk of any future events occurring.”
Asked how faculty can prepare their labs for future winter storms, Martín was emphatic.
“My goal … is that you shouldn’t have to prepare, especially for a winter weather event in the future,” Martín said. “We are going to take steps to help ensure that we do not see this type of event cause disruption and damage in our laboratory facilities in the future. You should be secure in the knowledge that you can leave your lab in subfreezing temperatures and not expect to come back to damaged equipment.”
Pancrazio offered practical advice while acknowledging the emotional toll.
“I will still worry about it,” Pancrazio said. “What we’ve learned from the event in 2021 and this event is that we’re most concerned about water streaming down from the ceilings onto equipment. Getting computers off the floor, even if it’s only a couple inches, is a good idea. Next time, I will go around to my microscopes and put a piece of plastic over the top of them.”
Martín responded by cautioning against putting plastic over heat-producing instruments to prevent fire damage.
“We do not want to swap flood damage for fire damage,” Martín said.
‘The response has been as good as it could be’
Several faculty members expressed appreciation for the university’s response while raising concerns about communication gaps and procedural hiccups.
Nanoelectronics professor Julia Hsu thanked officials for their responsiveness: “My lab is not yet running, but we are hoping that will happen this week. I’d like to thank everybody for being very responsive in answering my endless questions on which wall is coming down and when.”
Neuroscience professor Catherine Thorn said that shipping and receiving issues had created unnecessary stress. Her lab received numerous emails about cold packages needing pickup while the building was shut down, but lab members didn’t have access to physically retrieve them. She also said that her lab, which had moved from the third floor to the fourth floor over a year ago, was mistakenly grouped with minimally impacted spaces based on its old location rather than its current one.
“I think the response has been as good as it could be considering the complexity of the situation,” Thorn said. “But there were too many procedural issues that made things more stressful than they needed to be.”
Martín said UTD and the UT System together had an insurance deductible of $1 million for events like this, and that the damage estimate so far placed them well over this deductible threshold.
Shane Solis, director of risk and safety, acknowledged the problems. “We’re aware of the shipping and receiving issues. Ideally we’d like to pause shipments with our vendors beforehand or have additional storage so we don’t have to have those brought in in the future.”
Materials science and engineering professor Amy Walker reported significant equipment damage and asked about timelines for replacing it, especially equipment that can take over a year to be delivered.
Kathan McAllister, associate vice president for research operations, said that faculty should submit damage claims through a document provided Feb. 1. About 60% of affected labs have submitted claims so far. Once documentation is received, the repair or replacement process can begin without waiting for insurance reimbursement.
Regarding discontinued equipment, Martín said insurance should cover replacing it exactly, or if the same model isn’t available, with the closest available equivalent providing the same functionality.
Martín said UTD and the UT System together had an insurance deductible of $1 million for events like this, and that the damage estimate so far placed them well over this deductible threshold. Martín said that, beyond knowing it will exceed the deductible, the full cost of damages sustained at UTD is not yet available.
Looking ahead
Outgoing vice president for facilities and economic development Calvin Jamieson said that future building designs will account for the changing weather trends Texas has been experiencing. Martín closed the town hall by thanking both the recovery teams and the affected research community for their hard work and patience.
For now, researchers in BSB and NSERL continue the slow work of recovery: assessing damaged equipment, navigating insurance claims and waiting for replacement parts that could take months to arrive.