IU employees 'couldn't have worked any harder' on snow day

Daemon Shell, a custodian at the Herman B Wells Library, was fortunate enough to have the day off Jan. 28, the day IU had a snow day. But he still had to work in the snow later in the week.

As he was shoveling and salting sidewalks around the library, Shell received six compliments from students walking by.

“It’s my job. I take pride in my work. It’s something that has to be done,” Shell said. “It’s nice to get the compliments.”

With large amounts of falling snow last week, many employees worked themselves to the bone in an effort to get the University up and running quickly. The last time IU had a snow day was in 1996.

“My people couldn’t have worked any harder than they did,” said Mike Girvin, manager of the Campus Division of the Department of Physical Plant. “Probably some people would argue with me, but I think overall we did real well.”

Girvin said his department got approximately 100 complaints last week. But with his 54 employees working more than 16 hours on Wednesday, plus a lot of overtime the rest of the week, Girvin said they could not have covered all 51 miles of campus streets plus the long stretches of sidewalks.

He said his department could have used a few more employees last week, but it didn’t make much sense to hire them for only a couple of days.

“I guess it could always be a little better,” sophomore Melanie Vehslage said. “But since we’re not used to that much snow, I feel like they did a reasonable job.”

Vehslage said that while she didn’t have a car on campus to dig out, trudging through the large piles of snow on the sidewalks became difficult.

“Unfortunately, we don’t have the personnel to make everybody happy,” Girvin said. “And the problem is when you get a heavy snow like that, it doesn’t make any sense to put down salt.”

Girvin explained that if they had put salt down, once the plow trucks came along, all of the salt would be wiped back up.

Most of the complaints regarded snow that was plowed behind vehicles in the parking lots, Girvin said. He said their method for this was to make sure the lots were clear for emergency vehicles and then return later, since sometimes handicap lots tend to get blocked in, too.

Late last week, in order to assist students, RPS bought 100 shovels and distributed them throughout the residence halls for students to borrow to help dig out their vehicles. Previously, only the janitors had access to shovels, so the residence halls had very few to offer.

Director of Facilities for RPS Larry Ison agreed that snow blocking in vehicles did become a problem.

Ison said the first priority for the residence halls was to make sure the food courts stayed open for students, and sometimes it became hard to get delivery trucks out with the snow piled up behind them. But he said they did all they could to keep things going.

A few dining hall employees even stayed overnight Jan. 27 to ensure they could make it back in time to serve students the next morning.

“Work goes on as usual,” Ison said. “I think everybody’s been very good at understanding the difficulties (employees) face when we encounter 12 inches of snow.”