The Holdrege Area Public Library has been closing early in the last two weeks. The Library Director, Mike Burris, explains, “The library has an old boiler heating system that cannot be turned on and off automatically. The system has to be manually transferred over from air conditioning to heating and vice versa, so we can’t have the heating running in the morning while the air conditioner is running in the afternoon. We turned the system over to heating when we had a cold snap in early October, and the warmer afternoons and evenings pushed the interior temperatures of the library over 80 degrees. At that point, the safety measures for everyone’s health requires that all staff and patrons leave the library so that nobody gets sick from the elevated temperatures.
We believe that we are closing in on methods to keep the interior temperature within a safe range, and with the dropping temperatures outside, we might be past the point where we have to continue to close the library for everyone’s safety. If this does happen in the future, we would like everyone to know that we are working diligently to keep the library open for as long as we possibly can without harming anyone’s health.”
The Holdrege Area Public Library has been closed in the early afternoons four times in the last two weeks because of this issue.
