Students Unhappy with Campus Response to January Snowstorm
Leo Cantrell | February 24, 2022
Many students were stranded in their dorms during mid-January’s winter snowstorm, wondering when the roads and sidewalks would be safe to walk on.
Quinn Bonney
Students tracks in the uncleared snow outside of Owl’s Nest, the coffee shop on campus.
“The roads were icy and dangerous for almost a week after it snowed, and the school made absolutely no effort to help with the road conditions until students started discussing it and just doing so themselves,” one student wrote in response to a survey about Warren Wilson College’s (WWC) response to the snow.
The late-January survey revealed that of 34 anonymous participants, 94.1% did not think WWC did a good enough job of clearing snow from paths and roadways in a timely manner.
On the WWC app, students expressed dissatisfaction with the way Public Safety and the Cabinet handled the snow, citing that there was a fair warning of at least a week to prepare. Roads and pathways were shoveled by self-organized students, a task that Landscaping Crew would have handled pre-COVID-19, but the crew was disbanded at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. This lack of professional plowing and salting left the roads dangerously icy, causing multiple students to slip and fall.
Noah Swope suffered a wrist injury as a result of the black ice near the Ballfields dorms.
“Since they didn’t salt the parking lot at the base of Ballfields, we had 9 inches of snow compacted down onto itself that made walking pretty dangerous,” Swope said. “My car got stuck when it was half-way out of the parking spot. I slipped on the black ice that was underneath my car and injured my wrist. This was an easily preventable situation.”
Another student, Ella Syverson, sophomore, expanded on the need to have prepared for the snow storm for the safety of WWC students.
“Snow removal is a job that should have been pre-assigned to a crew or to staff,” Syverson wrote in the survey. “The school should have a comprehensive weather plan including snow/ice removal and transportation. … The snow and ice posed a safety risk to all students with a disproportionate impact on disabled students, and it’s unacceptable that Wilson failed to plan for and address this risk.”
WWC outsources its snow removal; according to Vice President of Administration and Finance Belinda Burke, the College is continuing to improve its handling of inclement weather.
“We were aware of the expected snow,” Burke wrote in an email. “The extremely cold conditions made the situation a little more difficult as everything continued to stay frozen. … Our contractor had some equipment issues that exacerbated the already tough conditions. The contractor has since purchased some new and additional equipment and as seen by the last snow storm is much better prepared to handle the clearing on campus. We have a plan in place now to ensure better communication with everyone about the conditions on campus. We are always open to hearing feedback and suggestions for how we can improve our operations.”
As Burke mentioned, it seems that future snow will be handled in an efficient and timely manner, as the student body has already seen happen with the smaller amount of snow since the initial snowstorm. With the second round of snow in early February, the paths were salted and the roads were plowed almost immediately after the snow had settled.
