Construction Disruption

Audible throughout campus and tossing up mysterious misty showers, the ongoing construction of the Discovery Building is quickly becoming an unavoidable inconvenience to all students passing through the Centennial Quad. As one is gridlocked attempting to navigate through the hundreds of students going to and from the Science Quad, there are several questions that come to mind. Is the construction safe to be around? Could this have been avoided with better planning? When will this ridiculous bottleneck situation be resolved?Day to day, the pedestrian congestion mirrors that of the 405’s vehicle jams during rush hour. The issue lies with a city water conduit that must be moved. In the interim, the fencing bordering the Michigan Ave. sidewalk has effectively decimated the amount of space hundreds of students must walk through to get to their next classes. During the school day, there is little to no foot traffic on the opposite side of the temporary Michigan Ave. fence. Why couldn’t the temporary chain link be remounted with a wider arc angle onto the sidewalk to allow for more space for students to pass through until construction takes place? Hopefully, the pathway will widen promptly after the completion of the Oct. 10 water pipe related construction.Besides pedestrian blockage, there could be far graver risks to the situation. Extended exposure to particle, emission and noise pollution could prove extremely unhealthy to students inside and outside the classroom. According to the nation’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention agency (CDC), construction sites generate an abundance of “PM10” particles (invisible to the naked eye) that can lead to eye, lung and throat irritation. Furthermore, the heavy vehicles being used daily are exhausting exorbitant amounts of diesel matter including carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, sulfates and more. These are all highly toxic gases that when mixed with other toxins in the air could increase the risks of particle inhalation.As if these potential health concerns weren’t enough, the noise being created from merely the destruction and terraforming of the land will continue to be a problem for students and teachers in the Innovation Building classes for years. The community can only hope that enough thought has been directed towards student safety and academic focus once the true construction began. Students are being crammed within a stone’s throw of a major project area. Is the community ready to accept these risks in order to speed up the construction of a building that hasn’t been used for daily function for over two years now?Upon closer analysis, one begins to wonder what type of planning was done. The decommissioned science building was demolished barely a week before school started. The reasoning is that toxic substances such as asbestos (found in older forms of insulation) needed to be removed to avoid aerosolization. While necessary, was three months of summer on top of two years of disuse not enough for the asbestos to be expunged? If the campus renovation plans were deliberated in the two years of the Science Building’s abandonment, why become impulsive to start demolition and construction at the beginning of the academic year rather than wait an additional three months and instead safely remove the asbestos during the school year and begin major building over the summer? Although city construction can have many unforeseeable obstacles, the Samo community must work together to mitigate the negative effects of these barriers to ensure our primary purpose at school, academic development, is not compromised by vanity. The school day can already be pressure-filled enough, we don’t need to add the worry of navigating unreasonable crowds or ignoring the sound of loud construction to our list of daily routines.