By Josh Williams–
Imagine waking up after a much-needed sleep to realize that you are cold, but not with a normal chill, rather, one that derived from being wet or close to some source of water. After gathering your bearings with a quick glance around, you realize that you are residing in a room in which puddles of water decorate the floor and a musty smell overtakes the air. Slowly, to your horror, you realize that this cavern-like area is your dorm room.
Due to intense rain and storms, many dorm rooms have flooded here at the university, as well as the surrounding streets. This caused a delay in school hours on Monday, Sept. 26. That morning, some students woke up to standing water in their room, water-damaged possessions and tears in their eyes as they witnessed their home away from home sinking into watery depths. This is a horror that I myself woke up to as others celebrated the cancellation of their early classes.
Throughout Louisville Hall and many other dorm rooms around campus, complaints flooded into the Housing Department as many students demanded their unfortunate situation to be taken care of quickly and efficiently by the housing staff. For some, aid has not yet come. Instead, due to the limited amount of workers and the large demand for their abilities to remove flood damage from dorm rooms, many still live in a home severely damaged by water. Even as I write this, three days after the flooding of my room, no steps have yet been taken to restore the dorm room to its previous glory.
Flooding is a natural disaster that no one can control. Sometimes, issues like these occur. The dilemma in how the Housing Department handles these problems. In a place where students pay a lot of money to live in, an unfortunate occurrence such as this would be expected to already have been taken care of, if not immediately, then as soon as possible. However, students, such as myself, are being subject to inhospitable conditions that causes all money being spent on a secure and safe room to be wasted as university housing hosts elements similar to the outdoors.
There are solutions to this problem. Primarily, numerous dorms on campus should not be experiencing this issue. Most importantly, the dorms on campus should be maintained in a way that ensures that students never have to wake up to a flooded bedroom. Upon calling the Housing Department to have someone fix the flooding in my room, I was told help would not come because their resources were spread thin as numerous complaints of the same nature had been made. A quick fix: renovations upon the dorms that would negate these types of issues from occurring again. Repair old roofs, replace faulty shingles and seal up cracked areas; anything that would prevent such an outbreak of this type to occur. After all, students pay a lot of money to live in these buildings and one has to question exactly where all of these funds go if no maintenance occurs.
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Photo: Flikr/University of Louisville
