It didn't take long for educators to react after a deadly fire roared through a Seton Hall University dormitory in January 2000, killing three students and injuring 62 others. Within three months, the Pennsylvania Board of Governors of the State System of Higher Education voted to install sprinkler systems in all 147 dormitories operated by its 14 state-owned schools.
As anyone who's ever fixed up an old house knows, bringing an aging structure up to code is not only laborious but expensive.
Little wonder, then, that administrators at California University of Pennsylvania decided after crunching the numbers to take a bold step. Rather than simply retrofitting the university's 40-year-old dorms with sprinklers, they came up with a plan to build brand-spanking-new dorms.
"When we costed out the price, we realized it would be cheaper to tear them down and put up new ones," said Angelo Armenti, the university's president since 1992.
Then they decided to take the plan one innovative step further.
The easy path would have been to construct the traditional (read: boring) boxes you see on so many other college campuses. Instead, the university opted for residence halls that would not only be kind to students in terms of space and amenities, but kind to the environment. As designed by WTW Architects, of Pittsburgh, all six on-campus dorms are green- design buildings, heated and cooled using geothermal heat pumps.
Geothermal energy, or using the earth to heat and cool a building, has actually been around for a long time. In ancient Rome and Pompeii, it was used to heat the water in bathhouses and homes. But it's only recently started to show up on college campuses.
These systems operate on a simple premise. Even in Western Pennsylvania, where the ground freezes in the winter, the temperature of the underlying earth remains a relatively constant 45 to 50 degrees year-round. A water-source heat pump, working through a system of buried plastic pipes known as a ground heat exchanger, pulls that available heat up in the winter and pushes heat back into the ground in the summer.
To install piping for its first three new dorms, the university drilled 150 wells and dug some 400 feet deep into the ground.
In addition, each dorm has a "heat wheel" that captures the temperature of the building's exhaust air. That air, when tempered with incoming fresh air, is delivered to areas requiring heating and cooling. The dorms also feature a magnetic switch on each window of every residence hall that sends a signal to shut the air-conditioning off when a window is opened.
Because geothermal heating systems require certain types of soil, not all colleges can employ it. The best candidates are those in rural areas with lots of green space. But for those that can, it pays off in the long run. Heat pumps use less electricity and because they have fewer mechanical components, break down less than conventional heating and cooling systems and are easier to repair.
Dr. Armenti said he believes Cal U is the only university in the state system that uses geothermal technology.
Construction of the new residence halls began in 2003. The technology added a cool $1 million upfront to the construction costs. However, the university broke even on that expenditure in just 2 1/2 years with reduced energy costs. The new dorms use about two-thirds of the energy the old ones did. With all six residence halls completed, that number will climb even higher with Cal U saving an estimated $750,000 a year on energy costs, Dr. Armenti said.
Yet money wasn't the sole motivation for painting the campus green.
Like other clean energy sources, such as wind and solar power, geothermal energy doesn't generate pollution or burn fossil fuels. "That's coal and oil that doesn't have to be burned," Dr. Armenti noted, "and that improves the quality of life on earth."
The rules the university operates under require that the residence halls, which ended up costing $121 million, be paid for by the people who use them -- that is to say, the university could use no state money. Instead, construction was financed through a bond issue made possible through a public-private partnership with the Student Association Inc., a nonprofit organization operated by the university's students.
Students might not fully appreciate that their eco-friendly dorms have made them a player in the fight against global warming. Or as Tim Skudlarek, an 18-year-old freshman from Little Valley, N.Y., put it, "They're what?" But they certainly love the updated digs.
While the old dorms had room for 1,300 students, by the late '90s only 1,100 or so were opting to live on campus. Built in the 1960s, they featured small rooms and communal bathrooms at the end of a hall with the dreaded "gang showers."
"There was no privacy, basically," said Dr. Armenti. "Students didn't want to live in them."
The rooms in the new apartment-style dorms, which house one to four students in each unit, are nearly twice as large. Perhaps more importantly, they have baths that would please even mom and dad. No student shares a shower or toilet with more than three other classmates; most share with only one other person. As a result, the number of kids who want to live on campus has increased dramatically. From the get-go, they've enjoyed 100 percent occupancy.
A recent survey of incoming freshmen, in fact, revealed that the number one reason for choosing Cal U was its residence halls.
Tom Ghafoor, a 19-year-old freshman biology major from North Huntingdon, couldn't be happier with his accommodations in the newly opened Residence Hall F.
"You only have to share a bathroom with one roommate," he said, grinning.
"They're really big," added junior Emily Reynolds, 21, of Pittsburgh, who is studying secondary English education. "It's even bigger than my room at home."
As for the geothermal heating system? Well, she didn't really know about that, "but as long as it runs, I'm happy," she said.
First Published: November 25, 2007, 10:00 a.m.