Editorial: Snow removal crews unable to sufficiently clean up in allotted time

As hopefully all students noticed, UConn decided to resume classes yesterday after a historic blizzard left the campus covered in over a foot of snow. What this means is that the powers that be decided that the campus was fit for both commuters and pedestrians. They deemed the roads, parking lots, bus lines and pedestrian walkways fit for adequate use as early as yesterday. However, as many students came to realize while trudging through the snow and slipping on the ice, the University was wrong.

After two days the extremely unorganized plan to clear the parking lots of cars so that plows could get through finally came to an end and everyone’s next thought was what’s to be done with the pedestrian walkways. Over the weekend, an e-mail was sent out to students requesting that they do not attempt to walk in the street to get to their destinations. However, even on Tuesday morning, parts of the campus were so under-plowed that walkways were still buried under a few feet of snow forcing students to either miss classes or walk in the roads.

Some buildings were not even given proper access. The campus’ newest building, Oak Hall, for example was inaccessible from one side. Students all over campus had to resort to walking to their morning classes on paths created by foot traffic.

Out of frustration, students took to Twitter to complain about the poor and downright unsafe conditions on campus. The main point of all of these tweets seemed to share a common question: why were classes not cancelled if conditions were so poor?
There are parts of Connecticut that are still unplowed and no means to get on the roads or major highways to get to campus. So with commuters unable to get to the school and pedestrians unable to walk safely to classes, we feel that the university needs to either explain its decision to have classes in these conditions or apologize for doing so.

Yesterday afternoon an e-mail was sent out on behalf of president Herbst that thanked the snow removal crews who worked around the clock during and after the storm to clear out the snow and react to this historic snowfall. We would like to agree with that sentiment. To be clear, our issue is not with the dedicated staff of removal crews, dining service and emergency service workers who did everything in their power to complete an extraordinarily difficult task. Our issue is with the university for unleashing students on the campus before these hard working people’s work was done.