Former football players ship motor to campus from Tenn.
BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff
Two former Rice football players saved the day when the campus lost most of its water supply during Hurricane Ike.
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 Instrument shop workers Terry Phillips, left, and supervisor Carl Riedel stand with the pump motor that was shipped from Tennessee to Rice. Former Rice football players John Huff and Jay Collins of Oceaneering International Inc. supplied the motor, restoring Rice's emergency water supply. Photo by Jeff Fitlow |
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”This started when the city lost its pumping station at Trinity River, which feeds the water treatment plants in Houston, and water pressure started to drop,” said Kevin Kirby, vice president for administration. ”So then we went to use the backup — our well — and the motor burned out.”
Enter Rice Athletics Director Chris Del Conte. ”I was in a conference call with the Crisis Management Team, and one of the things that came up was the well,” he said. ”We needed a massive motor.”
”The motor went down during the storm in the wee hours of Saturday morning, when we got all those electrical surges,” said Doug Tomlinson, assistant vice president of project management and engineering. ”I wasn’t part of the ride-out crew, but when I got in later on Saturday, they had already started looking for a replacement, and getting hold of our normal contacts was proving less than successful. That was when Chris started pulling some strings.”
”My first instinct,” said Del Conte, ”was that trying to get water must be like trying to get oil, and we have a lot of former students working in the oil industry. If anybody knows how to get something from 1,600 feet underground, it would be those guys.”
Del Conte put in a phone call to John Huff ’69 and Jay Collins ’68 of Oceaneering International Inc., a Houston company that supplies products to the offshore oil and gas industries. Collins succeeded Huff as president and CEO of the company in 2006.
”They were football players here in the late ’60s,” Del Conte recalled, ”and if it wasn’t for John and Jay and their love of Rice, we could have been in trouble. They didn’t hesitate for a second to answer the call for help.”
That meant getting the 2,500-pound motor assembly from Tennessee to Rice, and the former Owls wasted no time in making the arrangements. At the same time, two members of the Rice University Police Department, Jim Baylor and Niraj Rajbhandari, were dispatched to meet the delivery truck halfway, in Morgan City, La., to escort it the rest of the way to campus. ”It took five hours to get there and five to get back, and my understanding was they cruised all the way,” said Rice Chief of Police Bill Taylor. ”But they left at 1 a.m. Monday, so it wasn’t a big deal.”
”It was never a drinking water issue — we had plenty of bottled water,” said Kirby. ”We needed water for sanitary reasons, for toilets and showers. We needed water for the boilers so we could produce steam and hot water for cooking and cleaning. And we needed water to run the air-conditioning system — the chillers and the cooling tower. After the safety of our students and employees, water pressure turned out to be our biggest concern during this whole storm.”
Tomlinson said that with the new motor installed and the pump back in operation, he’s still considering getting the original motor fixed. ”We’re debating having it rewound,” he said. ”These situations only come up once every 10 years, but it would be nice to have a spare sitting around.”
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