Davis Roby, political science freshman, shared his frustration with facilities on the OCU Facebook group, after struggling with Walker Hall’s hot water system in the first week of school.
Days after returning to school, Roby said he was surprised to find the hot water in his Walker Hall room to be dysfunctional once again, after a series of outages at the beginning of the school year.
“I’ve found that the hot water in Walker Hall is consistent most of the time. However, at times it can be terrible. It will be off the entire day and sometimes is off for several with little information on when it will be back up again from the school,” Roby said.
Roby said he decided to share his complaints in the Facebook group because he believed it was time for the issue to be publicized.
“Does anyone know the process for getting the hot water back on in Walker Hall? It was an inconvenience in August or September when it was warmer. Now it’s frustrating its January, it is 25 degrees outside, and people can’t take warm showers,” Roby wrote on the OCU Facebook page, shortly after running into issues.
Roby said he wanted to start a conversation around the students’ irritation toward the frequency of hot water shut-offs throughout the first semester, as he felt they were being poorly communicated to students.
A Walker Hall resident assistant Zac Zubia, premed junior, suggested the use of work orders for future issues.
“I’ve lived in Walker Hall since the summer of 2018. The water goes in and out, and a lot of times there’s nothing we can do. It can take a while to heat up after a period when no one’s around, because no one knows when it’s not working, so I’ve experienced it go out quite a bit in my two years at Walker Hall,” Zubia said.
Shortly after the problem had been resolved, Casey Kreger, director of housing and residence life, commented on the post to remind students to always report outages so the issue can be fixed as soon as possible.
“The plumbing in Walker hall is fairly new. It’s less than five years old. They had redone the plumbing in the building to what modern day plumbing is. It’s no longer built on 1960’s steel pipes, so last fall we had an issue with the boiler and several motors that run it along with a couple of the circuit boards. You’d replace one piece, another piece would break, and when you replaced that one, two more would break. It ended up needing a series of repairs that caused the hot water outages that took place last September and August,” Kreger said.
Kreger said the issues with the machinery have since been rectified, and the remaining long-term kinds are related to the electrical components.
“What we have now is that if there is a power surge on campus, sometimes it will turn off the boiler. So, either someone lets us know, or my staff member when they’re doing their rounds notice. It’s really quick. Press a button and it turns back on,” Kreger said.
Kreger said the most efficient process for fixing issues like this is to report the issue immediately.
“The process is to call us, if it’s during the day. At night, I recommend calling the RA on-call, and we can get emergency maintenance to head over and fix the problem. If we don’t get that call, sometimes we will find out from a second had source, such as Facebook,” Kreger said.
Zubia said his biggest concern is when younger students have issues bothering them, but they don’t let him know so he can help.
“For me, it can be frustrating because I don’t have hot water for that day either, so if someone doesn’t let me know, it can’t be fixed. A problem with freshman can be when they don’t let anyone know something is wrong and they internalize it. If we don’t know there’s a problem, we can’t fix it,” Zubia said.
Regardless of the channels through which students can contribute to keeping Walker Hall functional, Roby said he would love to see a larger investment made by the university in making sure issues like this do not happen in the future, which is what encouraged him to make the post to begin with.
“I realize that having no hot water is quite a trivial issue. However, when people are paying as much money as they are to attend this school, a lack of hot water shouldn’t be a problem,” Roby said.
Kreger said he believes channels like the OCU Facebook page can be incredibly useful for keeping faculty in the loop with students to help fill their needs, despite not being the most efficient form of communicating technical issues.
“I think it’s always worth hearing student’s feedback. I think that’s always a good thing. Not always will you have the opportunity to get students in a formal way for feedback, so I think it’s always good,” he said. “The OCU page isn’t an official University-led page and are instead led by the students. Many of us are in it to help students any time help is needed. If they want to start a conversation about the water issue as a whole, do it.”
Housing and Residence life can be reached at 405-208-6363 or residencelife@okcu.edu.
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