OSHA puts a chill on UNR plan

How do you know when you've got too many regulatory bureaucrats?

When their devotion to the letter of "the code" starts getting in the way of common sense.

Some would argue there are agencies which reach that point the first week they open their doors. But there can no longer be much doubt the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has crossed the line.

This agency has ruled it causes workers in a cookie factory too much strain to pick up the tops of the sandwich cookies and place them atop the bottom halves. It's ruled one of the ingredients used in the manufacture of bricks is so potentially toxic it must be stored in a special shed with all kinds of complicated warnings and procedures to handle this toxic material, known to most of us as ... sand.

And now there's the case of the condensation water from the air conditioner of the new Joe Crowley Student Union at the University of Nevada, Reno.

Cooler air won't hold as much water as warm air. That's why virtually all air conditioners drip.

The huge industrial air conditioner for the new UNR facility condenses some 600,000 gallons of water per year out of the air. Since the facility opened last fall, that water has gone down the drain, wasted.

The UNR Division of Environmental Health and Safety University had a better idea. Why not collect that water and pump it outside the building, where it could be used to drip-irrigate the building's outdoor landscaping?

It cost about $60,000 to put in a cistern to collect the condensation from water towers used in the air conditioning system and for the pump to circulate the water through drip lines to planters outside the student union, said John Walsh, student union construction project manager.

The pump -- a "tiny little thing" about the size of a beer keg -- went into the "chiller room" that houses the air conditioner. Because that air conditioner contains a refrigerant that could be toxic if it leaked, the room is ventilated and equipped with leak detectors. University officials checked with the state Public Works Board to make sure there would be no problem with the plan. The Public Works Board checked the rules of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which merely bar "nonessential equipment" in the chiller room -- equipment not related to heating and cooling. Doing something with the 600,000 gallons of water the unit produced seemed pretty "essential," so the state board OK'd the plan.

At which point OSHA turned it down. The federal agency ordered the air conditioner couldn't be turned on, at all, till the pump was removed. And it's July. Even in Reno, it's starting to get a little warm. So the university complied.

The pump is gone; all the water is going back down the drain.

The state Public Works Board "approved the pump to be in the room and cited the same code that OSHA cited to make us remove it," explains Mr. Walsh. "They both ruled opposite ways."

Buzz Nelson, head of facilities services, said the university is seeking OSHA approval to connect piping to the cistern and use gravity to feed the irrigation system.

"Whether that will work or not, we don't know," he said. "We'll just have to see. ... If not, we'll see if we can add a pump back into the system, but it will have to be somewhere outside the cooler room. ..."

The pumping plan had symbolic significance, explains John Sagebiel, UNR manager of environmental affairs. "We need to be sending the community and our students a message about how we need to be living, and this pump is one example of how we could do that better."

But perhaps the affair of the student union water pump has taught students at UNR an even more important lesson -- what happens when you have too many regulatory bureaucrats, justifying their jobs by placing devotion to the letter of "the code" ahead of common sense.