By most accounts, this has been a rough week for those living in Penn's on-campus housing.
And it's only Wednesday.
Yesterday's flood in Harrison College House coupled with Monday's power outage in Hamilton and continuing problems with heating units in the Quad serve to reinforce the notion that the University's residences still are not up to par.
Given that all three of these buildings were "renovated" in the past three years, these problems are simply unacceptable. And it's not as if these are isolated incidents.
Each month of the fall semester brought a new facilities nightmare for students living in the high rise residences. From laundry room floods in Hamilton to leaks, power outages and further plumbing problems in Harrison, Facilities Services had a busy semester mopping up problems that should have been fixed during the construction process.
Residents have been evacuated, have lost power and have been left without water. Countless textbooks, computers and other personal belongings have been damaged.
How much exactly did those renovations cost? For the high rises: $26.5 million a piece. For the Quad: $75 million.
What is more troubling than simply the rash of incidents is the lax response and lack of information received by residents so far.
Some Quad residents waited 90 minutes for a response to a heating unit that had exploded. Hamilton residents were left in the dark -- literally -- as they were provided with little information about the blackout. An e-mail distributed Monday night warned residents that power may be again interrupted and that they might want to spend the night in the Harrison rooftop lounge.
These disruptions cannot continue. Winter storms come every year, so there is no excuse for frozen pipes.
Aging infrastructure should have been upgraded as part of the most recent phase of renovations -- but that was not the case. Facilities Services Director Betsy Robinson responded to high rise flooding problems last fall by saying, "they are 30 years old, but we're not renovating the core system, which is the plumbing system. So over 30 years' time, leaks will occur. The plumbing problems are going to exist."
Replacing the massive network of pipes in these buildings, admittedly, is a large undertaking. But it is a project that should be on the horizon. If it is already, Penn should explain the timetable to students.
If the University is serious about its long-term goal of moving the undergraduate population to on-campus housing, fixing the leaks -- large and small -- has to be priority number one. Penn could rebuild at least some rapport with students by simply showing that they care about fixing these problems.
