By Kelly Broder, Special to the Reporter
Waterlogged belongings, makeshift beds, and unresolved frustration defined this past week for students on UMass Boston’s Columbia Point campus who say the administration has not done enough to support the more than 600 of them students who were displaced after a 10th-floor pipe burst in the East Residence Hall a week ago Monday (Feb. 9).
“I feel like I’m begging, you know,” said freshman Yairamar Oropeza. “I’m begging for crumbs.”
Roughly 50 rooms were affected by water damage, but the now-broken fire suppression system is keeping students in all rooms from returning, university officials said. The burst forced residents — mostly freshman and transfer students — to evacuate and seek alternative housing.
The university has offered all students in East Residence Hall housing on UMass Amherst’s Charles River campus in Newton, a roughly 30-minute drive from Columbia Point and a more than two-hour trip on public transit.
Some 130 students are now being housed at the Charles River campus, while others, said Karen Ferrer-Muñiz, the vice chancellor for student affairs, are living in the DoubleTree hotel on Mount Vernon Street, which is about a 15-minute walk from the campus center.
Many more students are staying with friends in UMass Boston’s West Residence Hall, have gone home, or have found housing elsewhere.
For Oropeza, the past week has been exhausting. As a second-floor resident on the opposite side of East Residence Hall from where the flooding took place, she was offered housing at the Charles River campus, but, she said, students there did not have bedding, towels, or anything more than what they brought with them when they were evacuated.
“We thought it’d only be like 10 minutes,” Oropeza said of the fire alarm evacuation.
Later in the evening, officials from UMass Boston purchased bedding from a nearby Target but not enough for all the students at the Newton campus. “Other people just slept using their backpacks as a pillow and their coats as a blanket,” she said.
Oropeza noted that she has stayed at three different places since the pipe burst — the Charles River campus, a friend’s West Residence Hall dorm, and with her boyfriend in Cambridge.
Students at the Charles River campus say laundry facilities are not easily accessible, and that staying there and keeping up with schoolwork is difficult.
UMass Boston shuttles are going between the two campuses starting at 6:45 a.m. and continuing every hour until the last one leaves the UMass Boston Campus Center at 10 p.m., the residence hall support page on the school site says. The school has also partnered with Uber to transport students cost-free to and from the University Station shopping mall in Westwood from the Newton campus.
Students from the Sustainable UMass Boston club started a clothing drive for students displaced by the East Residence Hall closure. The drive will be open 12-8 p.m daily until Friday, Feb. 20. Kelly Broder photo
Students on campus have banded together to support their dorm-less peers by hosting a clothing and essential items drive. The evacuees, who were offered $1,000 from an emergency relief fund, according to Ferrer-Muñiz, were allowed back into their rooms on Wed., Feb. 11, to retrieve essential items like clothing and medication. They were then asked to move out the remainder of their belongings on Friday, when they came back to find tables full of free clothing, toiletries, and water bottles, and Saturday afternoon.
In an email to students last Friday, the university said it would provide moving trucks to transport student belongings to nearby short-term storage units.
Eli Hochkeppel, a junior, said they offered their own clothes to their friends who were affected, “but once I got permission to have a larger space, I started asking other people for donations. It really blew up” they said.
Hochkeppel said they feel that support organizations like U-ACCESS and the Office of Student Leadership and Community Engagement have done more for students than the school administration.
Added Oropeza: “These students, they’re really the heart of UMass Boston, because they really, really have been supporting one another through all of this.”
Students have been using YikYak, a social media app that allows users within a roughly 5-mile radius to post anonymous messages, share resources and discuss the residence hall situation.
The first floor dining commons reopened last Wednesday morning for regular meal hours, but the remaining residential floors will stay closed while flood remediation crews work to restore the damaged rooms. State inspectors are coming “in and out constantly” to assess things, said Ferrer-Muñiz.
She noted that flood remediation crews are working through “different stages of restoration” and that there is no definitive timeline for when the building, or certain floors, might reopen.
Students should contact university officials if they need help, she said. “Instead of wondering, please come in and talk to one of us. We want to see them. We want to help them. We want to talk to them.”
This story is part of a partnership between the Dorchester Reporter and the Boston University Department of Journalism.
