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Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute said that the cleaning service failed to properly train a janitor and is seeking $1 million in damages.
For 20 years, a Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professor had been working on what the university described as potentially groundbreaking work.
It all ended with the accidental flip of a switch.
The university is seeking $1 million in damages from Daigle Cleaning Systems in Albany, N.Y., for breach of contract and for failing to properly train a janitor who turned off a circuit breaker in September 2020, cutting power to the freezer and destroying its contents, according to a lawsuit filed this month in Rensselaer County Supreme Court.
The janitor, Joseph Herrington, said in a deposition that he had become concerned because “annoying alarms” were coming from the freezer and he worried that “important breakers” had been turned off. But instead of turning them to the “on” position, the lawsuit says, he had turned them off.
In the lawsuit, which was reported by The Times Union of Albany, Rensselaer said Mr. Herrington “is a person with special needs,” but the university accused his employer of not providing adequate training on “how to handle specialized and delicate equipment.”
Rensselaer and the cleaning company did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
It was unclear what kind of research was being conducted in the lab, but according to the lawsuit, the work was overseen by K.V. Lakshmi, a professor and the director of Rensselaer’s Center for Biochemical Solar Energy Research. According to the lawsuit, Dr. Lakshmi was conducting “high level research” inside the Cogswell Laboratory building on the university’s campus in Troy, N.Y. The lab included a freezer that housed cell cultures and samples that had to be kept at minus 80 degrees Celsius (minus 112 degrees Fahrenheit).
A small temperature fluctuation of even just a few degrees would “cause catastrophic damage and many cell cultures and samples could be lost,” the lawsuit said. As a precaution, an alarm would sound if the freezer’s temperature increased to minus 78 degrees or decreased to minus 82 degrees.
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