With campus going from ghost town in the summer to swarms of students, Texas A&M has to ensure that uneven sidewalks do not trip bike riders on their way to class, fire extinguishers do not spew water more extravagantly than the fountains and classrooms are not muggy on the first days of school — which can climb above 100 degrees.
The Environmental Health and Safety Department oversees waste management and inspections of campus facilities and promotes industrial hygiene throughout campus. Working hand-in-hand with Environmental Health and Safety, or EHS, Facilities and Energy Services manages vendors and staff to maintain the well-being of the university grounds. From regularly cleaning commonly touched areas to ensuring dorms are comfortable for students, Facilities and Energy Services oversee the task of promoting safe and sterile spaces for the campus.
They provide students with resources to request maintenance and communicate with professionals if they spot a potential hazard. Assistant Vice President for EHS Christina Robertson, Class of 1989, said they communicate with staff and other departments to care for A&M students.
“Taking personal responsibility for your safety, following the guidelines that are expressed and adhering to those guidelines — I think that’s the best you can do,” Robertson said. “Reporting things if something seems out of the ordinary. If you feel like a safety hazard has gone unmitigated. It may be that nobody has reported it to us, or we haven’t observed it, and so taking the initiative to communicate that to us is very helpful.”
Heather Quiram, Class of 1995 and director of Facilities Management, works as a liaison for outside vendors such as SSC Services For Education, Creating Clean, Safe Learning Environments.
“Our primary goal is to work with our outside vendor SSC and all of our partners on campus, environmental health and safety, utilities and energy services and all the other groups on campus, to ensure and maintain a safe and comfortable built environment,” Quiram said. “If [Robertson’s] team finds a failure at one of the points from the health and safety perspective, then it’s our responsibility to ensure that either SSC or another vendor makes the appropriate repairs to mitigate whatever the failure is.”
A&M is cleaned by custodial staff and ready to go each day for students to remain comfortable and enjoy a clean environment, they said. Despite the campus’s effort to maintain the commonly touched areas, Quiram recommends students do their part to prevent disease.
“We have a phenomenal custodial crew across campus,” Quiram said. “They work diligently to ensure there are paper products in the restrooms and that the commonly-touched areas stay as clean as possible, but [we] ask people if you are ill: Stay home [and] do the very best you can to mitigate your exposure to your peers because there’s so much traffic moving through a lot of these spaces.”
Students can submit a request for maintenance on the website AggieWorks, which allows on- and off-campus students to communicate with facilities management to fix any issues promptly.
“Through this site, anyone with a UIN can submit a work request for a repair,” Quiram said. “A door handle doesn’t turn well, a sink continues to drip, an interior or exterior light is out, et cetera. Please call 979-845-4311 for facility-related emergencies.”
With an expected influx of illnesses and the peak of Texas heat as the semester starts, air quality is also a priority. In addition to the complex systems designed to maintain air quality, faculty lends a helping hand to ensure students are comfortable.
“Air filters get changed regularly so the air handlers work appropriately,” Quiram said. “We inspect those periodically and ensure that they’re in there appropriately so they can function as they should … You tend to see either uncomfortable temperatures or uncomfortable humidity levels in the space, and nine times out of ten … those can get addressed within a couple of hours.”
Spotting something out of the norm is an opportunity to report it and help others. Even something as small as an uneven brick on the sidewalk or broken door handles are handled by these departments.
“We very much want to keep, … establish and maintain this safe environment for everyone, for, quite literally, everyone, to live and learn and work in,” Robertson said.
