Boston University students have experienced increasing problems with their dormitories, but when they report these problems, action seems to take a considerable amount of time, they said.
Boston University student Ashley Coombs turned her oven to self-clean in her South Campus apartment last October, only to smell it smoking a few seconds later.
Coombs, a College of Arts and Sciences junior, said she notified her Residence Assistant, who then called Building and Grounds Services, but no one arrived until Coombs called a second time. They came back a few days later to give Coombs and her roommates a new oven fan.
“Potentially, there was a fire, and nobody came to help us,” Coombs said. “It was just inefficient the way the whole system was working, and no one was coming exactly when we needed them to be here.”
Last March, Coombs said she encountered another problem in which a toilet upstairs overflowed and began leaking into her kitchen.
“It was just this whole process, because nobody responded,” she said. “I had to go out of my way to have somebody help me sanitize the kitchen.”
The Dean of Students Office, in a joint effort with Dining Services and the Office of Housing, moved CAS sophomore Emma Tupay into her current Bay State Road dormitory after she complained of pests in her Warren Towers room early this semester, she said.
Tupay said her room had carpenter ants, regular ants and at least one mouse, she said. She called Building and Grounds first and talked to the hall directors in Warren B Tower. Building and Grounds sent pest control in to spray the room every single day, but the pests kept coming back.
“I think that they were doing as much as they could, but in that type of situation, where it was technically an infestation, they needed to get us and all of our stuff out of the room as quickly as possible, which they weren’t doing,” she said.
Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences senior Marie Clarke said she has never had any problems with the places she has lived in. Clarke has lived in the Hyatt Regency Cambridge and Myles Standish Hall and now lives in Danielson Hall.
“I think it’s pretty awesome that they guarantee undergraduate housing for four years,” Clarke said.
Director of Housing Marc Robillard said that when it comes to dorm problems, he has only heard of “routine issues” such as furniture, pests and heating problems.
Robillard said students should not assume their problems cannot be fixed, but should contact their residence office.
“Anything to do with the physical facility, be it pest or furniture or fire code or things of that nature, always go to the residence office,” he said. “The residence office will know who to communicate with.”
He said the school constantly tries to fix all dorm problems. At the beginning of each semester, the facilities and housing staff go through each room to identify problems.
“Some things we can’t discover until after the students arrive,” he said. “We’re always renovating buildings and trying to make improvements to our facilities.”