Sometimes in the mornings, when the canyon breeze unrolls the scent of damp annual flower beds like a blanket over the Quad, we stall our frenetic
paces for a moment just to breath it in. Later, within countless tidy classrooms and gathering commons, we sometimes recognize our own physical settlings, that curious ability to better focus somehow, to dive into new ideas, or to listen — really listen — to an old friend. Sometimes we secretly wish for more days when the Greatest Snow on Earth in sudden, burgeoning volume, shuts everything down to send us on our individual, improvised ways. But in truth, we know, that rarely ever happens here, even where in a blink, a Prius can poof into powdered passing. And sometimes, upon polished panels of glass and steel, we catch the reflections of the faceted spurs on the Bear River Range and are reminded to turn around and humbly gawk — again. There’s something about this place; we can see it and we can feel it. Stories have been told and students have been sold on Utah State University’s essence and presence. Of course that’s just exactly how some 230 full-time employees of USU Facilities would have it be. Moving about unnoticed, both in their routines and in emergencies, ingrained in their incomprehensible culture of labors. Over night and through the weekend they continue, a highly trained army of capable technicians and resident professionals representing every imaginable trade, from high-voltage electricians to horticulturists, engineers to maintenance folk, architects and planners to finishers and receivers and recyclers and waste management thinkers and risk management experts and painters and major building systems heroes and business servicers and locksmiths and central distributors and surplus shufflers and buffers and shiners and carpenters and Oh WOW! This is one vast and varied, trained and re-trained, cutting-edge force! And maybe only they themselves really know just how early those flowers are started from seed, or just how those classrooms receive their daily polish, or just how acre upon acre of sidewalk and road are magically shoveled before classes begin on a freezing February day. Still they are fueled by a spirit of doing, confident there is no job they don’t have the collective expertise to do. If one shop is short-handed and about to be devoured by deadline, another just steps up — to do. Charles Darnell, Associate Vice President of USU Facilities knows about all the other stuff. He can tell you about the elevators and the HVAC systems and USU’s co-generation plant with its 4.5 Megawatt turbine that produces around 50 percent of the energy campus consumes per year. He can tell you his army of experts is able to extract steam from that process to then warm campus and about the 5,000 tons of chilling capacity and about the $1 million or so co-generation saves USU annually. He can detail major water and electrical distribution and dual feeds and response times and substations and design standards to reduce maintenance costs and increase building longevity and land and water acquisition efforts and speak of an orderly transition of campus growth and oversight and about mind-boggling deferred maintenance burdens. Or, he can tell you what someone told him all those many years ago when he himself stood on the brink of a career in just doing: “You won’t get rich at it, but it’s intensley satisfying.” Happy customers; palpable, physical progress; minimal turnover; the impassioned pleas to never ever, under any circumstance, remove that one special employee from a given building or area — these are the paydays for Darnell and his managers. Here we hope to add maybe one payday more in the name of their heart-zinging employees — by shining the light on a paltry six USU Facilitators, while understanding each one of them probably represents some three dozen more. Of course, you could thank them yourself … and you surely should … the next time you venture off behind the scenes.
IN PRAISE OF
THE DOERS Every Trade. Every Effort. The Men and Women of USU Facilities Stories and photos by Jared Thayne ’99
14 UTAHSTATE I FALL 2015
