Adjustments after winter storms

Valeria Henderson | THE RIDER

In light of the February winter storms in Texas, the UTRGV community is aiming to get back on track after a week of disruptions, including power outages, burst pipes and icy roads. 

Gabriel Diez, a mass communication junior, said the aftermath of the storms had the biggest effect.

“It was very easy to fall out of the routine of working and staying on track,” Diez said. “It is more the aftermath that is one of the biggest effects. It’s like a big game of catch up now.”

He said he communicated with colleagues and professors to reach the information needed. 

“It was a little bit tricky,” Diez said. “For the most part, one student would get a response and the professor would say, ‘Let anyone who you can know, know,’ like a game of telephone, but it did work out.” 

Associate Vice President for Marketing and Communication Patrick Gonzales said the university is committed to safety and success during times of crisis.

“We’ve had this mantra throughout this last year, when we faced the pandemic, faced the hurricane, of commitment to safety and success,” Gonzales said. “Our first priority was to keep our students safe. That is why we made the decision to cancel classes and to make campus inaccessible. On the success part of it, we tried to let our students and our faculty know to work together to make sure our students were able to continue their classes and be successful and be flexible as much as possible with assignments and tests.” 

Abraham Hernandez, Facilities executive director, said it is safe to return to campus and buildings are fully operational.

“We had Facility staff out here during all hours of this artic front,” Hernandez said. “Some of them were here at night, some of them were here in the morning. When everybody else was off our staff was here most of the time. Trying to address the issue before it became bigger issues.” 

Although there was damage, he said the facilities are fully functional.

“Some of the units that we lost, they’re in common areas,” Hernandez said. “So, the building is still fully functional, but the common area may be lacking some air. So, will it affect the facilities? No, they’re fully functional.”

He said some irrigation pipes broke due to the pipes being outdoors.

“So, those are kind of anticipated because they are outside exposed to full weather,” Hernandez said. “The buildings are fully functional, fully operational. That we made sure was addressed primarily before everything else.”

The Facilities director said the department is creating a list to address issues caused by the storms.

“Right now, we’re in the process of creating a list of what we need to address to prevent some of the items that we saw as a result of the winter storm,” Hernandez said. “We’re going to be … adding some additional protocols to try to address some of the issues that we encountered. We have a lot of generators on campus but they all work. We have one of them that went down but all of them were working so you know a lot of those things work to their designs. You know it’s a lot of the stuff outside that we need to come up with another solution to prevent this from occurring again [in the] near future.”