Word: steamingly
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Those who know the tunnels--the B&G workers who service the pipes, and Thomas Tribal, Harvard's manager of Energy and Systems-rarely spin such yarns, and instead speak of the utility of these energy-efficient heating highways. Behind this steam screen of infamy and intrigue is really an emphatically nuts and bolts operation that supplies heat to most of the University...
Roughly two miles of underground tunnels house the pipes that carry steam from the Cambridge Steam plant near Harvard's Peabody Terrace apartments to almost all University buildings, excluding the medical area. Steam runs through the pipes to individual campus halls and houses, as far north as the Law School and biology labs as well as across the river to the Business School, and is returned to the plant as condense water, formed from the cooled steam...
...them around the clock. Two men work full-time in the tunnels, and other shifts are rotated between a group of Buildings and Grounds workers. Workers fix leaks, operate valves and inspect the pipes, paying special attention to the pipe joints which expand and contract in response to the steam's heat. Failure of these joints to slide freely could create safety hazard, says Chester P. White, one of the two full-time tuneless. "If a line ever went there'd be no getting out" he warns...
Telephones at intervals throughout the passageways allow the workers to make quick contact with the Science Center monitoring operation, and a hotline provides immediate communication with Cambridge Steam should the steam need to be shut off during an emergency. One might expect that only necessity would prompt a descent into Harvard's bowels. The tunnels are fairly small, approximately eight feet square on average, and crowded with pipes. The heat can be sweltering, ordinarily about 100*F but rising above 120* in the dead of winter when all steam lines are in use Damp stains and sporadic graffiti blotch...
Paradoxically, B&G's elaborate security measures seem only to fuel interest in the tunnels which owe their widespread appeal largely to their secrecy. "The thrill is beating the system." Tribble says of student trysts in the tunnels. Certainly the food tunnels, which run parallel to the steam lines from Kirkland to Leverett House, have little of this vaporish mystique. (Though the food tunnels do have a history of their own--it was through these passages that Secretary of Defense MacNamara eluded angry demonstrators during his visit to Harvard.) Although the food tunnels are also closed, students are occasionally granted...