The Badger Herald: News: Grade UW’s snow efforts

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Grade UW’s snow efforts

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By Ken Harris
Thursday, February 14, 2008 1:33 a.m.

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While still struggling to deal with Madison’s snowiest winter on record, University of Wisconsin officials said Wednesday they are going to reevaluate how the institution deals with snow removal — and they said they need help.

Alan Fish, UW associate vice provost for facilities, released a statement in response to critiques of the job the university has done removing snow on campus.

According to the statement, UW will hold meetings this spring “before concerns of our customers are forgotten” to discuss options for improving its current performance.

John Harrod, director of UW Physical Plant, the department that controls snow removal, said UW has already created an e-mail address to receive suggestions for improvements. The address is snow@fpm.wisc.edu.

“We established the site to get people to help identify the problem areas,” Harrod said. “It’s not a complaint site.”

According to Harrod, the entire grounds crew for the university is deployed full time on snow removal during the winter. He added a lot of maintenance crews and janitorial staff are also diverted to help with the efforts, affecting the cleanliness of the buildings themselves.

Harrod said during snowstorms some members of the snow removal crew cannot travel to work, making the job even harder. He added the university has considered hiring students to place on call lists for emergencies.

However, this does not always work because some workers fail to respond when called, he said.

“Part of the challenge we’ve had in past years is that folks aren’t necessarily reliable,” Harrod said.

UW officials said they hope to have “sit-down sessions” with students, faculty and staff sometime near the end of March or the beginning of April, according to Harrod.

UW senior Max Bruner said he has had no trouble getting around campus, as UW has done a great job considering the record amount of snowfall this year.

“As a student walking around, I haven’t had a major problem,” Bruner said. “You just have got to be careful not to slip. I see all the tractors and everything moving the snow, so I don’t have any complaints.”

Bruner said he is also impressed with UW’s use of less salt and more sand in the mixtures it uses to deal with the ice because he said the practice is cleaner for the lake.

UW graduate student Josh Clements said UW should reevaluate the areas they take care of first but added the university does a good job otherwise.

“Considering we’ve gotten so much snow this year, I think it’s a little unreasonable for people to expect it to be gone the next morning,” Clements said. “Especially considering you have to be paying people overtime to be out there shoveling snow.”

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