Relocating chillers on the roof at 135 Montgomery Street after Irene and Sandy places them out of harm's way during future flooding.
The board at 135 Montgomery Street, a 21-story residential co-op in Jersey City, knows their building’s prime location along the waterfront comes at a price. In 2011, Hurricane Irene destroyed the new chillers that replaced the building’s original chillers from 1963 only two years earlier. Barely a year later, Superstorm Sandy struck, flooding the ground floor and mechanical room, including the practically new chillers.
Realizing that the property is susceptible to flooding from future storms, the board decided they needed to put the third set of replacement chillers out of harm’s way. The new location? Up on the roof.
In this brief podcast with Habitat magazine, RAND’s Principal and Mechanical/Electrical/Plumbing Team Leader Peter Varsalona discusses the replacement and relocation of the chillers and the challenge of completing the project in a tight six-month time frame before the summer cooling season. For more on the project, see our previous blog post Three Times the Chill.
Now whenever there’s the threat of a major storm, the board at 135 Montgomery Street know they’ve taken the proper steps to protect their building’s cooling system and hopefully avoid a repeat of disasters past.
