There were many issues that occurred on campus last month, including the RAC flooding, water outage, heat outage and power outage. The close proximity and effects of these issues have raised many questions.

Lenn Caron, assistant vice president for Facilities Management, assured that “each of these problems is independent of each other and aren’t related in any way” and emphasized that “it’s just bad luck that we had them all in the month of October.”

The first issue, the RAC flood, occurred on Oct. 2 due to a valve on the sprinkler system standpipe that failed while being tested. “As a result, the wood floor was damaged beyond repair,” Caron explained. The wood floor has since been removed and administration is currently in the process of picking and installing new flooring material.

The water outage on Oct. 12 occurred in relation to a Baltimore City water main break. Facilities management worked with the city water department to fix the issue. According to Caron, “One of the complications with this outage was that the main break was not in a visible location, making it very difficult for the city to locate.” Once they located it, they were able to restore the water.

Thirdly, on Oct. 21, there was an equipment failure within the UMBC central plant, causing a shutdown of UMBC’s high-temperature water heating and cooling services. This caused a loss in building heat for many of the building on campus. “Facilities Management worked with multiple contractors to locate the necessary parts and restore heat as soon as possible,” Caron said.  

Most recently, on Oct. 27, there was a campus-wide power outage. The outage occurred because a vehicle hit the power pole where power is fed into the campus. Caron said that “BGE notified Facilities Management after the accident and agreed to wait until 4 p.m. to make repairs so that we had time to send a campus-wide text alert and inform the campus community of the pending outage and duration.” The reason many food sites were closed on campus is due to the fact that “backup generator wouldn’t necessary power everything in the building — just emergency circuits,” Caron explained.

The explanations do not negate the effects that these issues had on the lives of students, with some students being more affected than others. Zachary Pena, a junior information systems major living on campus, says, “In my three years being here, we haven’t had these things happen and it is a little weird that they are all happening in a back to back nature.” He mentioned that the water outage only had a minimum impact on him because he lived about twenty minutes from campus and was able to “go home to take a shower.” He further explained that other students, such as international students, would face the issues more acutely and it would not be good “having no heat or power.”

Likewise, Luis Oliva, a freshman majoring in economics living on campus, says that “the RAC flooding was annoying because [he] couldn’t do some workouts” and suggested that some of these issues are more avoidable and foreseeable than others.

BmoreArt is a Baltimore-based print magazine and webzine that celebrates, questions, and critiques art and culture. It started out as a community-based blog in 2007 and evolved into a professional webzine in 2014 and biannual print journal in 2015. BmoreArt works with a diverse team of writers, art historians, artists, photographers, and designers to create a multifaceted and authentic vision of Baltimore as a place for creativity and community, but also serves as a constructive critic.

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TRAVEL TO THE UK WITH THE UMBC ANCIENT STUDIES DEPARTMENT IN MARCH 2019

The UMBC Ancient Studies Department will conduct its 53rd annual study tour in the UK, March 15-23, 2019. The cost of the tour is $3000, and it will include all international and domestic air and land travel, twin-share accommodation for eight nights at three-star hotels, eight buffet breakfasts, three group dinners, one group lunch, and entrance to all archaeological sites, museums, and events on the itinerary. Single rooms are available at an additional $576 per person. ANCS majors and minors, UMBC students, faculty, staff, alumni, and members of the community are invited to join us. The trip can be taken as part of a three-credit course taught by Dr. Melissa Bailey Kutner and Prof. Tim Phin in the Winter 2019 term (ANCS 301). Scholarships to help pay for the costs of the trip are available to Ancient Studies majors who enroll in the course; one scholarship is available to pay the costs of the course. Places are limited, so reserve yours today! This is a wonderful opportunity to see archaeological sites and museums in the UK. If you are interested in joining us, please submit your registration form to Domonique Pitts (dpitts@umbc.edu). An initial deposit of $500.00 is due when your application is submitted.

The tour begins with a three-night stay at Royal National Hotel in Russell Square, followed by one night in Southampton, one night in Bath, and two nights at Premier Inn Quayside in Newcastle, before spending the final night at Royal National in London. The stay in London includes visits to the Museum of London, the Mithraeum, Billingsgate House and Bath, the British Museum, and an evening performance of Romeo and Juliet at the Globe Theatre. We then head for Southampton, visiting Celleva Atrebatum, Avebury Stone Circle, Keillor Museum, and Stonehenge on the way. The following day we travel to Fishbourne Roman Palace and Museum and Maiden Castle before stopping in Bath for the night. The next morning we visit the Roman Baths and Museum before flying from Bristol to Newcastle. From Newcastle, we visit Vindolanda, Sycamore Gap on Hadrian’s Wall, and Housesteads. The following day we fly to London to enjoy a free day, leaving London for Baltimore the next day.

Registration can be found here

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This year, the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, whose home is on the UMBC campus, turns 20. The purpose and hope for the program is to gain more knowledge about urban ecosystems.

The study is one of only two urban Long-Term Ecological Research projects first allotted funding by the National Science Foundation; the other is the Central Arizona – Phoenix study. In contrast, other project sites are located in wild or rural areas.

LTER was established 18 years prior to BES in 1980, though even by the late 1990s, “the field of urban ecology basically didn’t exist,” says Claire Welty, UMBC’s director of the Center for Urban Environmental Research and Education. She continues to say that this is a completely unique study incomparable to any other in the world, going as far as to call it “an international icon,” and praising it as “a rich resource for people to use in their research.”

In the frequently asked questions section on BES’s website, one of the questions is, “Why is this research so novel?” Relating back to Welty’s question about urban ecology, the answer reads that “[in] spite of the fact that a majority of the US population lives in metropolitan areas, for a long time ecologists rarely studied cities and their surrounding suburban and rural lands as ecological systems.” Due to the longevity of the study, the data enables the study’s researchers to take note of “how [environmental] systems change in response to what we do” to the area and in its space, according to Andy Miller, professor of geography and environmental systems.

Baltimore is also a part of Revitalizing Baltimore, “an alliance of seventeen different organizations working together to create a model program for community forestry and watershed restorations,” and the Urban Resources Initiative. The Urban Resources Initiative was started by the Parks and People Foundation, which “coordinates research and shares data with local, county, and state governments, natural resource managers, and community leaders engaged in managing and restoring Baltimore’s natural environment.”

The BES study has the opportunity to create options to minimize the negative effects that urbanization and development have on the environment. However, the advancement of these possibilities is made more difficult because it requires the compliance and support of those with the influence to create and change policies and laws, including organizations such as the Maryland Department of the Environment, and even the Department of Natural Resources.

The BES has also been successful in enabling the creation of the GES department’s graduate program at UMBC by obtaining funding from the NSF’s Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship program for the first group of students. This program reaches both graduate students and Baltimore region K-12 students to “teach them about their local ecosystems and the importance of caring for the environment,” in an attempt to make the next generation more environmentally conscious and dedicated to environmental success.

As the data collection progresses, more environmental aspects can be studied and tracked. In the future, the project hopes to shine a light on pollution and its effects, as they can appear subtle and worsen gradually over time.