The Hole Story

Number of manholes on campus. Photo: Jeff Miller.

There’s a reason why UW-Madison is in the Big Ten: it’s a big university. Its central campus covers 936 acres and has 388 buildings (since the opening of Signe Skott Cooper Hall, home of the School of Nursing, in 2014). Servicing all of these buildings across all this area isn’t easy. The university uses 1,107 manholes to maintain twenty-five miles of sanitary sewers, and twenty-five miles more of storm sewers. That means the UW has one manhole for every 238 and a half feet of pipe.

Published in the Fall 2015 issue