Boiler problems put the freeze on Sisters Elementary School

Some of the students at Sisters Elementary School didn't need to take off their coats when they arrived at school on a chilly 24-degree Monday morning, October 30. The boiler had tripped off sometime over the weekend and needed to be manually restarted when staff arrived and found that there was no heat.

Zoann Armbruster, the district's accounts payable clerk told The Nugget that maintenance supervisor Leland Bliss went early Monday morning and was still working on the problem at 8:30 a.m. Ted Thonstad, Superintendent of Sisters School District, did a walk-through and said that the school was warming and that there were only a couple of classrooms where the heat was in the lower 60s.

"The boiler tripped out; we don't know when it tripped out," he said. "We really don't know what is causing it yet, but we have a couple of ideas. We are investigating the problem. What is happening is that the boiler responds like a thermostat in the home. When it gets to a certain temperature, it shuts off. The problem is that it isn't turning back on, and it has to be manually restarted. Unfortunately, it is doing it intermittently, not all the time, which makes it difficult to discover the problem," Thonstad said.

The more serious issue Thonstad reported was a pipe breaking in a kindergarten class due to a hard freeze. There was some flooding.

"The real problem was the pipe breaking, and we had to turn off the water there so that repairs could be made. We are in the process of cleaning up so that we can get the room back into use," Thonstad said.

The replacement of the elementary school's boiler was one of 12 capital improvement projects that the Sisters School District completed during the first nine months of 2006. The approved budget for the 12 projects was $389,700, and the budget for the replacement of the boiler was $74,000. The district reported in a press release on October 9 that all 12 projects were completed on schedule and for a total cost of $389,700, 5.7 percent under budget.

The new boiler was installed and operational well before the project's projected completion date of October 30, which ironically was the day the unit malfunctioned.

Thonstad concluded, "We are in contact with the engineers in Portland, and we are going to get it fixed. We don't want cold kids or cold staff."