“The cleaning company had a $1.4 million contract to clean the RPI facilities during the 2020 fall semester.”
For the sake of an annoyed, but stupid, janitor. Had.
What is insane is that if all this work was so valuable, that the University didn’t have alarms for the freezer.
Power outages happen, so I would have expected an independent monitoring system would alert key personnel if the temp rose above a set point.
What surprises me is that this hasn’t happened before. Maybe it was caught before it was too late in other instances, but I can definitely see this happening.
They could have made a grad-student clean the lab for the same price.
Me thinks there’s more to this story.
So there was a third-party cleaning service.
I suppose that at one time the university had custodians on staff who did the cleaning. Those folks might clean the same rooms for a decade. They usually knew what to do and what not do.
But it’s much cheaper to hire an outside company. Well, you get what you pay for.
How about $1. If it was so important, it would have had backup and more robust alarm reporting. My guess is the school is happy to have this gone, happy to have someone to blame for it going away.
25 years of work is priced at a mere 1M$? was this the work of 1 grad student who’s advisor kept asking for ‘1 more thing?’
This is not that unusual. Labs and researchers always complain about this sort of thing. Always moaning about the inadequacy of their facilities. Then when we propose projects to fix it they never find them. Yet they always say how much money is at risk...why not take 3% of the supposed at risk revenue and fix the facility problems? Stop relying on 25 year old, neglected equipment. Doctors are not that smart
Government grant gone.
If it was that important, how could a janitor shut it down with one switch? I would think there would be some kind of lockout device.
It’s called a “NIC”. Every PDU and UPS in a well constructed data center has them.
Not that this excuses the actions of the janitor.
L
Depends on what it was
The beeping probably was an alarm of some kind. The janitor just began blindly throwing switches until the annoying beeps went away.
The freezer contained cell cultures, samples and other research elements that were stored at minus-112 degrees Fahrenheit until September 2020, when an employee of Daigle Cleaning Services turned off a circuit breaker. That caused the temperature to rise to a relatively toasty minus-25.6 degrees Fahrenheit,
On Sept. 14, 2020, the freezer alarm went off when the temperature rose to minus-108.4 degrees Fahrenheit. Lakshmi, her faculty and students responded. Lakshmi “determined that the cell cultures, samples and research were not being harmed,” the lawsuit stated.
Lakshmi contacted the freezer manufacturer regarding emergency repairs, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic, that work could not be done until Sept. 21, 2020. During that time, an alarm beep was sounding.
A sign in bold print in capital letters was posted on the freezer door: “THIS FREEZER IS BEEPING AS IT IS UNDER REPAIR. PLEASE DO NOT MOVE OR UNPLUG IT. NO CLEANING REQUIRED IN THIS AREA. YOU CAN PRESS THE ALARM/TEST MUTE BUTTON FOR 5-10 SECONDS IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO MUTE THE SOUND.”
The lawsuit states that on Sept. 17, 2020, a Daigle cleaner turned off the circuit breaker, which cut electricity to the freezer. When Lakshmi’s graduate research staff discovered the next day that the temperature had risen, they took steps to save the research materials.
First - no one thought to have the sign posted in multiple languages?
Half the kids at RPI are from overseas, English is the third or fourth language and most any of them could have posted a copy in whatever language they wanted.
There is even a thing called Google translate to help out ... or they could have pushed the button themselves!
Rensselaer Institute needed to pack up and leave Troy New York decades ago.
Troy New York needed to be packed up right afterwards.