A cold snap on the prairie last winter proved particularly devastating at Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie in Wilmington, when a poorly performing heating system led to burst pipes and other damage.
A year later, the headquarters, welcome center and hub of operations where the USDA Forest Service leads prairie restoration and wildlife management efforts will be undergoing a restoration of its own, leading to a nearly two-month closure of the building beginning Dec. 9.
Most outdoor activities at Midewin will be unaffected, but some indoor programming will be delayed or canceled, including part of Midewin’s popular winter lecture series, according to a forest service news release.
Joseph Wax, Midewin’s public affairs officer, said last winter’s frozen pipes led to months of discomfort for Midewin staff, volunteers and visitors.
“The building was super hot all summer,” he said. “There were days where we had to close the building.”
Already overtaxed, the heating and air conditioning system at the supervisor’s office and welcome center, erected in 2001 shortly after Midewin transitioned from the former Joliet Arsenal, was further compromised by the pipe burst, Wax said.
“It turned into a situation where the whole system needed to be overhauled,” he said. It wasn’t as simple as fixing some pipes and maybe updating some things. The system wasn’t keeping up with the environment it’s in.”
“We had hoped to be able to update the system without closing the entire supervisor’s office,” Christina Henderson, Midewin’s prairie supervisor, said in the release. “Unfortunately, with the nature and the extent of the work that needs to be done, that isn’t possible.”
Wax said the estimated $500,000 project was timed “to have the least impact on the public and our partners.”
“This was done in such a way that it doesn’t affect field season, which ends with the snow and the winter,” he said. “We do field work all year long, but what we call field season is the 8 or 9 months when the weather is the best.”
Among the impacted facilities are Midewin’s only plumbed bathrooms, which will be closed throughout the project. Wax said pit toilets and portable units throughout the property will remain open.
The welcome center itself won’t see the bulk of the work — “nothing will have to be taken down or moved,” Wax said. But in the administrative parts of the building, they will have to take down cubicles and move furniture.
Work is expected to be completed near the end of January, when Wax said a shortened schedule of winter lectures will resume, starting with a virtual presentation in February about Michigan State University and University of Missouri research projects related to the effects of Midewin’s bison herd on their pasture’s plants and birds.
Midewin’s supervisor’s office and welcome center may not be its only structure in line for an upgrade.
Wax said partnerships between the National Tallgrass Prairie and University of Illinois at Chicago and Purdue University involve graduate students in landscape architecture programs creating reuse concepts for some of the vestiges of the old Joliet Arsenal.
A number of bunkers that once housed explosives are still used for storage, albeit of far less volatile material. One is permanently open to the public, but others are unused. One idea students came up with was to cut one “essentially in half,” Wax said, for use as a shelter by birders and hikers. Another concept was to use a bunker as the setting for a larger memorial to the arsenal workers killed in a 1942 explosion.
“A skylight would be cut into (the bunker) and the memorial and statue for the explosion victims would be moved into the bunker and that would become a show space for that memorial,” Wax said.
While that work is still in a conceptual phase, Wax said after months of working without adequate climate control, he’s happy to see the project starting at the supervisor’s office and welcome center.
“I’m overjoyed,” he said. “It was difficult this last year. There were multiple times where we had to just leave, last minute, and you’re not planning for it. We had to cancel some educational programming.
“Doing anything last minute like that is hard on the staff, and hard on the community. It will be nice to have all that taken care of.”
As of right now, the facility is scheduled to reopen with functional climate control on Jan. 27.
peisenberg@tribpub.com
