Precipitation and cold weather have been plaguing the campus for the past weeks, bringing with them a variety of problems. Specifically, ice from the last storm and heating problems in Wren Hall have left many students chilled.
Since the beginning of the semester, the heat has gone off twice in at least part of Wren, according to sophomore Nathan Render, one of Wren's resident assistants.
The most recent occurrence was on Saturday, he said. "We ended up calling Facilities, and contacted the [resident director] in Wren and Facilities came out pretty much immediately and fixed the problem and then they came to my room and made sure everything was okay with my residents," he said.
He said that Facilities has been helpful, but that it's not clear that the building is free from problems.
On an earlier occasion, the heat stopped working in some of his residents' rooms on a Friday night, but the problem was not fixed until the following week.
According to Render, the delay was the result of miscommunication between the residents of Wren, the Tufts University Police Department and Facilities. "People didn't call the police right away, and Facilities doesn't work on the weekends unless it's an emergency and nothing happened until after the weekend," he said.
Before the problem was fixed, Director of Residential Life and Learning Yolanda King brought space heaters as a temporary solution for some of the afflicted rooms, according to Render.
Director of Medford Facilities Ron Esposito corroborated this. "The students that have had the problems have been given electric heat on a temporary basis," he said.
Beyond that, he said that further steps were also taken. "We sent someone around to check for blocks in the baseboard heating, and we also boosted the temperature from 180 degrees to 200 degrees," he said. This increase was applied to the water running through the heaters that then radiates throughout the building.
According to Esposito, this temperature boost is unprecedented since every building apart from Wren maintains its water temperature at or below 180 degrees Fahrenheit.
He also said that Facilities did not find any problems with the hot water delivery or any radiation blockages. "The heaters are working," he said.
Esposito did mention that there are six rooms on every floor on Wren Hall which are more exposed to the weather than the other rooms in the building and could benefit from some extra baseboard heating. "That's primarily what the problem is," he said.
He also revealed that Facilities hopes to install the additional heating over the summer.
"I'm 70 percent sure that this will happen as a project, but it's not committed," he said.
But other winter-related problems may not be as correctable, he said. Despite the lasting presence of ice on campus, he said that Facilities did all that it could to clean up after the storm that hit campus earlier this month.
"It's pretty much an impossible storm, pretty much the worst storm we've had," he said.
Whereas last year he said that Facilities was able to clear away 30 inches of snow, this storm proved elusive.
"This time we had rain and sleet, and we put 20 tons of sand and 20 tons of ice-melt down. No expense was spared," he said.
Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senator and sophomore Pooja Chokshi agreed. Chokshi, who is the co-chair of the Senate's Administration and Policy Committee, along with two other senators, met with Esposito and some of his associates in response to student concern about the ice. "Basically they told us that the snowstorm that they had was really an isolated case," Chokshi said.
Still, she said that senators will continue to meet with members of Facilities every month to assure that student concerns are heard.
"They do understand that students did have issues and they're glad that we brought it to their attention," she said.
