Diving deep into marine science
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arwick Academy has recently completed its new marine science facility, built on campus property along Harbour Road in Warwick. Jessica Young, who teaches environmental systems and is department head at Warwick Academy, says, “The harbour is a diverse ecosystem, and this facility provides many opportunities for study. The lab is not just exclusively for use by our students: We are also in talks with Bermuda College who are interested in offering a degree in marine science; BIOS (Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences) has said there are some things it would like to do at our dock; and we are also inviting government schools that can’t get all the way down to BIOS to use our facility. We want it to benefit the whole community and to be inclusive.” Ms. Young says two ongoing activities would be storm surge monitoring and a coral storage holding facility, which will be used for artificial reef-building. Prior to construction, BIOS and the Bermuda Aquarium, Museum, and Zoo (BAMZ) volunteered their time to discuss their facilities so that Warwick could learn from their experience. Roz Wingate, Warwick Academy’s science technician, and marine center coordinator, attended and took notes from those
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meetings and passed them on to Jonathan Gaugain, owner at JAG Construction, and Gary McCullough, Warwick’s facilities manager to help with the blueprint of the project. The building required a plumbing system similar to the ones at BIOS and BAMZ, and this was one of the major focuses of the design and construction. Ms. Young says they had to get creative as this wasn’t a “regular house design with regular plumbing. These basic designs don’t work. It has to be specific, to provide for the tanks and lab facilities the students use.” Mr. Gaugain says of the plumbing system: the saltwater gets picked up and sent to the first of two 1,000-gallon tanks with baffles. The system requires industrial and higher-pressure water flow Schedule 80 PVC pipes to make the transfer. “We had to go with a bigger pipe because of marine growth,” Mr. Gaugain says. “If we went with a smaller one, it would get growth, which would starve the system and strain the pumps. We used Schedule 80 pipes for durability and longevity.” There are blank flange ends on the pipes to make cleaning easy. He adds: “The system is designed so all the ends come off. You stick a bottle cleaner down
the pipe and push the growth out at the other end. That will have to happen every six months to a year.” Mr. Gaugain says union joints on the pipes make it easy to disassemble part of the system. The system also uses two 2-hp pool pumps. One is the main, and the second functions as a backup in case of breakdown or maintenance. The water flows to a pipe sticking up through the middle of the first tank to allow the water to spill in it. Once the water reaches a certain height, it flows through another pipe to the second tank. This allows for sediment to remain in the first tank. The water from the second tank then flows underneath decking, then up to the lab’s eight workstations in the pagoda. This system allows the water to be clear rather than cloudy. Each of the workstations has 1-footdeep plastic bins, in which the students will conduct their experiments. The pagoda has 12 cement-filled fiberglass columns to hold it in place against hurricanes. Because the lab sits at the water’s edge, there were hurricane protection considerations that needed to be met. “When it was originally designed, it was 4 or 5 feet closer to the water’s edge,” Mr. McCullough says. “We had to pull it back and up to make BUILDINGBERMUDA2021
