Had UW Cinematheque organizers known what was coming, they might have reconsidered naming their most recent film series Bleak Week. It was almost too on the nose.

The one-week series, which promised “cinema of despair,” was scheduled to end on Tuesday, but came to an abrupt end Monday evening without its final two screenings. And on Wednesday, director Jim Healy announced that all summer programming in July had been cancelled, due to the fallout from a burst chilled water supply line outside the Charter Street Heating Plant earlier this month.

Dozens of campus buildings have been completely or partially closed without a stream of air conditioning amid a punishing extreme heat warning. The ordeal is upending events, moving classes online, and challenging university functions. More reason to despair: a permanent fix is expected to take at least a month.

For Cinematheque, that means nixing screenings this summer, including The Producers (the 1968 original was slated for July 1) and Smorgasbord (Cracking Up), the Jerry Lewis joint scheduled for July 24.

Staff were still grappling with making the final call earlier this week. On a hot and humid June 30, operations coordinator Ben Reiser was unable to share a final decision. He added that while program staff were trying to “make their case” to have some cold air blown their way during film screenings, he was “beginning to resign myself to the idea that this isn’t going to happen.”

It was the second hurdle for the summer screenings. Two days before the kickoff of Bleak Week, UW Cinematheque’s digital projector failed. The team scrambled to swap it with a 350-pound projector from the Chazen Museum of Art across the street.

“We were amazed with ourselves that we were able to get all that done in a really short amount of time, given how long things usually take to coordinate on campus,” says Reiser. “But then this second round of a crisis was really one crisis too many.”

Cinematheque is located on the fourth floor of Vilas Hall, one of nearly a dozen buildings that are now closed to the public but still have partial access and cooling for specialty functions, according to a June 29 update from UW-Madison. Nearly two dozen other buildings, including Bascom Hall, Ingraham Hall and Science Hall, are entirely closed to the public. They were locked up on Monday and now have prominent red signs reading “CLOSED.”

Holding screenings without air conditioning could pose a liability issue (think heatstroke); yet UW personnel are not allowed to bring in their own air conditioning units (standard fans, writes UW, are permitted). Reiser tried to find other screening options at other venues on and off campus. None were a fit.

Three floors above in Vilas Hall, public radio and television offices have made other plans. Most staff at Wisconsin Public Radio and Wisconsin Public Television are working from home.

One staffer, who requested not to be named because they were not authorized to speak on the issue, tells Isthmus that only essential personnel, including hosts, technical directors, and the TV crew, are still working in the office. They add that it’s less disruptive than the pandemic shutdown in 2020. Most staff, they say, already work a hybrid schedule: “We basically know how to do it.”

For some students, summer classes are being relocated or being held online. Hannah, a senior on campus studying biochemistry enrolled in a summer math class, declined to share her last name on Monday. She hadn’t yet heard that some campus buildings were closed because of the chilled water line break, but had just seen an email from her professor announcing that class and office hours would move online for the week.

“I am unsure which emoji to use here, as I both hate teaching online yet also hate the suffocating heat (who doesn’t?) in a non A/C room,” wrote her professor.

UW leadership has said priority cooling areas include medical areas and research areas; officials are also focused on “mitigating impacts to in-person instruction.” UW crews have installed 30 temporary chillers across campus that are expected to stay through the repair. They’re being powered by on-site generators, confirms UW-Madison spokesperson John Lucas.

The chillers are bright blue, emit a loud noise, and bear the words Aggreko, a global provider of generators, chillers and heaters that can run on either diesel or natural gas. Lucas did not answer a question on what energy source these generators are using, and UW’s alerts have not detailed that either.

Closer examination suggests diesel. Most chillers are connected to a black rectangle of a similar size, and have smaller fuel tanks that read “on-demand fuel tank rentals” from TransCube, which are commonly used to store and transport diesel, but not natural gas.

As of Tuesday, chillers and generators had been installed outside major research buildings, including the the Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences Building, UW Engineering, the Harlow Center for Biological Psychology, the Wisconsin Primate Center, and the Educational Sciences Building. Some are located directly next to residential housing. 

One chiller has been installed outside the Chazen Museum of Art, and several units dominated parts of Library Mall, close to Memorial Library.