Students displaced from rooms as FRES responds to repairs

In the event of an indoor flood, roof collapse or toilet eruption, Facilities and Real Estate Services is meant to come to Penn faculty and students’ rescue. However, some students say repair operations are not always immediate or timely.

Toward the end of October 2014, College freshmen Rive Cadwallader and Taylor Daniel had the unpleasant experience of sewage water dripping into their Quad dorm room.

“I was working at my desk and I heard this weird tapping noise,” Cadwallader said. “I thought it was a mouse of something, but then I realized it was water that was dripping through the ceiling.”

“And the water was not clear,” Daniel said.

The water dripped now and again for a period of about 10 days before Cadwallader and Daniel were moved out of their room. While repairs were underway, Cadwallader and Daniel, along with other affected residents, were put up in the Sheraton Hotel, free of charge, they said. According to the Sheraton website, a room for two at the end of April would cost $219 per night.

Cadwallader and Daniel spent approximately another 10 days in the Sheraton before repairs were completed. “They told us at first that to fix the floor would take three to four days, but then we also asked to get the ceiling fixed,” Daniel said. They were told that due to workplace incidents and staff ailments, the repairs lasted for several more days than expected.

“It was not exactly an unhappy experience,” Daniel said. “Everyone who we talked to was so accommodating and tried their best appease everybody.”

FRES’ operation center is manned 24/7 to receive repair requests from the Penn community, and there is also a web interface to accept non-urgent requests.

“We receive about 95,000 work orders a year,” FRES Executive of Operations Ken Ogawa said. “It’s a huge volume of work to take care of the buildings and the building infrastructure.”

FRES tries to respond to service requests as soon as it is feasible. “Based on the situation, we begin to take action right away,” Ogawa said. “Our first action is stop the leak or whatever it might be, make it stable to minimize the damage to personal property or the infrastructure. Of course we need to make it safe — safety is the first priority.”

“The bulk of those work orders are done by a staff of about 200 people,” Ogawa said. “Plus we hire contractors and others commonly — it’s not a black-and-white answer.”

But late at night, it might be harder to get an immediate response to an urgent request.

FRES’ maintenance workforce is primarily a day-shift operation. “After hours, depending on what all is going on around campus and depending on how severe the situation is that they report, I may or may not be able to get someone there immediately,” Ogawa said.

This February, when 34th Street contributor and College freshman Amanda Silberling experienced a steady leak in her Quad dorm room from a pipe burst, she was disappointed when FRES took several hours to respond.

“My roommate and I had called Facilities by around seven in the morning, but a maintenance worker didn’t get there until between 10 and 11 o’clock,” Silberling said.

Water continuously poured into their dorm room for several hours until a repairman could arrive on scene and stop it.

“At night, I basically have one person in the command center, and he has two people for the entire campus — that’s what I have on campus at 2 o’clock in the morning,” Ogawa said.

Silberling and her roommate were placed into single rooms in the Quad for close to three weeks until repairs and cleaning were completed.

“Having to move back into my old room was difficult,” she said. “We had to pack up all my belongings and move once again at a time when I had a lot going on.”

But Ogawa is still satisfied with the work FRES does. “Obviously with the volume of work we do it’s not an easy task, but I think we do a very good job,” he said.

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