The multitaskers: Clemson University Facilities Maintenance Services team keeps Tigertown running smoothly

With 355 buildings (and counting) dotting its 1,400-acre campus, one could look at Clemson University as much like a city as it is a school.

It has all the needs of any municipality: water, electricity, heating in the winter and cooling in the summer, fire mitigation, and all the other unseen details that make up a city’s infrastructure.

Keeping it running smoothly falls on the Clemson University Facilities Maintenance Services teams, and the breadth of their duties might surprise you.

The residential buildings alone account for more than 1.6 million square feet of interior space that must be kept safe and comfortable for students. As of this writing, that includes 1,676 toilets, 1,584 showers and 3,812 sinks to keep flowing.

All told, the Maintenance Services team oversees more than nine million square feet of living and working space.

“Our work may be behind the scenes, but it’s impactful,” says Maintenance Services Director Anthony Harvey. “I’m proud to work with an incredible group of people who are dedicated to keeping campus running smoothly, seven days a week. It’s a huge responsibility, and we take it very seriously.”

Caring for campus

Maintenance Services has responded to 21,475 corrective work orders with 24,777 phases and 12,859 preventative maintenance work orders with 19,485 phases in the past year.

“A work order can have multiple phases for additional shops doing work on the same order,” explains Harvey. “Many of these may be the after-hours group handling initial triage for a work order and then turning it over to first shift trades shops to fix the following day.”

Numbers like that make it hard to choose just a few examples to highlight.

In South Carolina summers, for instance, keeping people comfortable means keeping the air conditioning on, which means keeping the coils in the HVAC units clean. Keeping them clean is imperative for air quality as well. The University currently owns 1,626 HVAC units, ranging in size from a microwave to a small house. A six-person crew cleans coils full-time, going from building to building to open and clean the units, which are sometimes so large that they can walk inside to pressure wash the coils. It takes two years to service the entire campus, at which point they return to the first building and start the cycle all over again.

These people got skills

Clemson’s maintenance crews are comprised of highly skilled men and women, many of whom hold advanced degrees and certifications. Electrician Stevie Mason, who originally hails from Germany, was servicing the exterior lighting around Douthit Hills, replacing broken fixtures that cost the University $400 a piece, when he had an idea to use open-source software and design replacement parts, removing the need to replace the whole fixture. His 3D-printed LED components will eventually save the University tens of thousands of dollars.

“We were paying a lot of money for retrofits for the lighting in our older buildings,” says Mason. “Retrofits are costly or unavailable because they’re 20 or 30 years old. It is way cheaper to produce the parts ourselves.”

“There’s no specific thing we deal with on a daily basis,” says facilities after-hours maintenance supervisor Dylin Turner. “We’ve pulled dead deer out of the road during football games, clipped lines out of buildings that were leaking and replaced them, electrical work, HVAC work – we try to focus on urgent jobs like floods, leaks and power outages, but we can end up doing anything, really.”

A few more examples include bringing HVAC online for the Carolina Panthers during an important meeting at the Madren Center, helping the University weather hurricanes and snowstorms, covering every football game and holiday, being on-site for the Savanna Bananas event earlier this year, and assisting CUPD with vandalism or emergency building issues.

“We’ve also helped project managers meet project deadlines and assisted the moving crew with moves,” Turner says.

Looking out for community

The most important responsibilities given to Clemson’s maintenance crews deal with fire protection, inspection and testing. Their life safety team is unique in the state, as four of them are certified by the National Institute of Certifying Engineering Technologies (NICET), a rigorous program for professional certification based on testing that covers a broad range of job knowledge, verification of job performance, and an evaluation of work experience. It takes years to acquire the qualification, which they accomplish in addition to their full-time jobs.

Life safety and fire protection systems supervisor Dennis Holt is level three NICET-certified, enabling the team to take care of most jobs in-house, which makes hiring outside contractors unnecessary and saves the University hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.

Holt says his favorite part of the job is the people.

“Interacting with different people all day, every day is what makes it all worth it,” says Holt. “I’ve been with the University for 18 years in January, so I’ve been through a lot of ups and downs, but the ability not to do the same thing every day is huge for me.”

As the highest-certified member of the team, part of Holt’s job is training the next generation of workers so Clemson can retain the institutional knowledge that would be lost otherwise.

“Our Life Safety shop consists of technicians specializing in fire protection, residential plumbing and steam.  This team plays a significant role in keeping our students, faculty and staff safe and comfortable in their environments, and they take that responsibility very seriously,” says Harvey. “I appreciate how quickly they respond when issues arise, especially for building emergencies. The fire protection group techs have had to work very hard to achieve their licensure, and Facilities is lucky to have such a great group of dedicated employees.”

Since emergencies and malfunctions don’t keep office hours, the University has a second-shift maintenance team comprised of seven technicians that respond to repair requests outside of regular business hours, from 4 p.m. to 2 a.m. Monday- through Friday and noon to midnight on weekends.

“We handle maintenance across all buildings and tackle just about anything that comes our way after hours,” says Turner. “If an issue is too in-depth, we make it safe and ensure the day shift can pick it up with a plan in place.”

Residence hall room fire alarms are one of the common emergencies the second shift team must deal with, says Life Safety manager Sean Stapleton.

“Once a student who lived on the ninth floor of one of the dorms hung a flashlight off a sprinkler head with a carabiner, which set off the fire alarm and flooded the entire building,” recalls Stapleton. “If an alarm goes off, we respond no matter what.”

The variety of jobs in the University maintenance team just goes on from there: The dining halls crew maintains all the walk-in coolers, stoves, ovens, fryers and other kitchen equipment in the dining hall kitchens; a team of locksmiths change the locks on more than 3,000 residence hall rooms every summer; dedicated engineers monitor building elevators and the campus fire alarm system, to name a few.

Individually, they represent an astounding range of trades and skills, which, combined, make for an efficient and effective team.

“We collaborate with each other all the time. The object is to communicate and figure it out,” says Turner. “We’re all multi-skilled, and some of us are masters of certain trades, so together, there’s really no problem we can’t fix.

“These guys are talented, motivated, and I believe they represent the future that Clemson is looking for. They are the heart of the campus.”