As you may have heard, JLab was hit hard by hurricane Isabel. While the physical damage to the site was minimal, we were without power for long enough that the helium that keeps the linac cold was lost and the entire accelerator warmed up. Recovery from the warmup will probably add about one month to the accelerator down period. In about two weeks we expect to have a better understanding of the details of Isabel's impact and a more accurate estimate of when we will resume operations; we will update you at that time. Very roughly we will probably simply "slide" the existing schedule in time, but if users with scheduled experiments have other considerations that we should take into account they should contact me as soon as possible. It may also be necessary to make changes based on technical considerations once we see how the linac recovers (this is the first time the entire machine has been temperature cycled, and while we are confident (based on temperature cycling tests of individual cryomodules) that we will be able to restore it to previous levels of performance, it may not be possible to provide all accelerator capabilities immediately.

Over the course of the next year every effort will be made to recover the integrated beamtime that was projected for the upcoming year by deliberately reducing the duration of downtimes later in the year. We regret any inconveniences caused by this unique event.

content by U/I Liaison
maintained by webmaster@jlab.org
updated September 24, 2003