CHEATSHEET
EACH WEEKTHE PENDULUM DEBRIEFS COMPLEX EVENTS BY INTERVIEWING RELEV|j
Physical Plant on tho front linos of campus cleai
Tom Flood, director of Physical
Plant, reflects on natural disaster
preparation and recovery
Alex Hager
Elon News Network |@awhager
When forecasts started showing a “cat
astrophic” storm with Alamance County
right in its path, Elon Physical Plant was
tasked with battening down the hatch
es. The department,
broadly in charge of
the schools infra
structure and facili
ties, took on the chal
lenge of preparing
campus for the worst.
Tom Flood, director
of Physical Plant, was
at the helm this past
week as steps were tak
en to ensure safety for
students and buildings in the face of Flor
ences predicted wind and rain.
Q: What informs your decisions
when it comes to emergency
preparedness?
A: We go off the incidences that weVe
had in the past and what we can project
as the future. Were keeping note of what
is being decided with students. Are they
staying on campus? How many may we
have to shelter, what is our response to
electrical outage? Preparedness for things
like emergency generators and sandbag
ging is based on our level of experience.
One of the most significant was in Au
gust of this year when we had some tor
rential rain storms come through.
In one afternoon, we lost power to a
major portion of campus at a time when
we had six inches of rain in a two-hour
period. So, when they were forecasting
seven to 10 inches over seven days for
the hurricane, I had a comparison saying,
‘Well thafs a lot of rain, and if it comes ^
at once, were going to have some prob
lems’
(^: What did yon learn from that
August flooding? What kind of
tweaks did you make?
A; The first thing we did the next day is
look at those buildings and say, what can
we do to fix this? Where did the water get
in? How can we stop that? How can we
make our facilities more resilient? So, we
undertook more than a dozen projects
in the last month to improve those situ
ations.
We have a couple more we’re still go
ing to do. They’re a little larger, so we
weren’t able to get them completed in the
last 30 days, but they are still on the dock
et to be completed this fall. Adding some
storm drainage at Carolina and adding
some storm drainage by Global B, there’ll
be some construction activity for that.
Q: Is preparing for a hurricane
simUar to preparing for a
snowstorm or an ice storm?
A: Ice storms are very similar in that your
risk is the same risk, it’s power outages.
We could have a tree fall virtually any day
of the year. A wind, a rainstorm, you nev
er know. It’s somewhat random. We have
arborists that work in the trees every day
to minimize risk. We remove anything
that we can see is weak... Power outages
are the thing that we can’t control because
we don’t control the distribution system
and we are a little bit at the mercy of
Duke Energy to keep our power on.
Q; When you need all hands
on deck to keep things
running during a storm, how
do you make sure all of your
Physical Plant workers pick up downed branches in Lambert Academic Village on Friday, Sept. U.
employees can travel to campus
safely?
A: AJl of our physical plant staff are
emergency personnel, which means as
part of their job description duties when
they’re hired, they know that they need
to be here in any emergency response.
Thafs just part of our job. It’s part of who
we are. We are running basically a small
city and people depend on us for our ser
vice.
We always say if you have a risk, don’t
go on the road. If you have family to take
care of, take care of them. Were not going
to supersede that and put you in a diffi
cult position.
We will allow people to stay. Often,
we’ll find people asleep in the break
room. I had a new employee one time
who was so concerned about getting here
for a snow storm, we discovered him
asleep in his car in a sleeping bag. So, we
said, ‘For goodness sakes, come inside.’
We usually set up some space in some
facility as a bunk house if we need to. If
they’re worried about getting here or get
ting home, we take care of them, we feed
them.
%
; How much did it cost to make
■ of the preparations?
A: The cost for the preparation was ac
tually fairly minor because most of it
was able to be done during the workday
and the week. We brought in one backup
generator so we would have the ability to
keep Clohan Hall running for food ser
vices. That was probably the only single
major expense that we had, and that was
only a couple thousand dollars. We did
run some hurricane response teams over
part of the weekend, so we had multi
trades, specialty skilled here 24 hours a
day until we finally pulled them Saturday
evening. ^
Q; How many jokes have you
gotten about your name this
week?
A; This summer we had a series of tor
rential rainstorms all summer long, and
yeah. I’ve gotten several this year about T
wish you’d change your name so it would
Stop raining.’
106 Church St
Elon, NC 27244
Newly Refurbished
2 BDRM unit=$700/studeii
1BDRMumt=$555
Indudesall utilities plus intemetand calil