This year’s Safety Walk participants found three broken emergency beacons on campus.
The Department of Student Life hosts the Safety Walk every year as a part of Safety Week. This year, students and faculty discovered issues with blue light emergency beacons, wheelchair ramp accessibility and poor lighting.
The blue light emergency beacons are spread all throughout campus and work by telecom communication. When the button is pressed, MU Police Department is contacted and alerted from the exact location of the beacon.
“The thing about the blue lights is, they are, I would say, probably less than five times used a year, especially in Greektown, which is honestly kinda surprising,” Missouri Students Association President Sean Earl said.
Since Aug. 15, the emergency beacons have been pressed 24 times around campus. Thirty-three emergency beacon phones were recorded as “not working” or “light out” in September, according to a report obtained through MU Custodian of Records Paula Barrett.
Steve Pilcher from Campus Facilities is working in the next two weeks to fix the broken blue lights on Rollins Street, Director of Student Services Casey Frost said in an email.
Frost initially said she hadn’t heard the blue light emergency beacons were dysfunctional.
“As far as I know none of the Blue emergency lights were broken,” Frost said in an email a week after the Safety Walk.
In total, three emergency blue lights on Rollins Street, the WG-1 parking lot near the Tiger Avenue Parking Structure and Burnham Road failed to send an alert to the emergency system when tested on the walk.
Some of the lights and systems are not located on university property and therefore have to be handled by Columbia officials. Emergency beacons on campus are checked by Maintenance, a department within Campus Facilities. They file a work order before the emergency beacons are fixed.
“As issues are reported, work orders are submitted and addressed as soon as time allows,” Campus Operations Communications Manager Karlan Seville said in an email.
Maintenance checks the emergency blue lights every 1-3 days. The three broken emergency beacons found on the Safety Walk are projected to be fixed in one to two weeks.
“Maintenance does monthly checks and goes around campus, but they file a work order. If you file one, you’re looking at another, and you can’t follow up necessarily all the time with how that work order went,” Earl said.
The Campus Safety Officers, in conjunction with the MU Police Department, check each light and emergency beacon monthly, Seville said in an email.
As for the other issues found during the Safety Walk, the poor lighting around campus is due to the construction behind Memorial Union. The sidewalk and streetlights will be fixed after construction in those areas.
Sean Joy, an MU graduate who works on inclusion and accessibility for Missouri Student Unions, and union administration are working to make wheelchair ramps more clearly accessible to students with disabilities, specifically around Memorial Union, Earl said in an email.
_Edited by Emily Gallion | egallion@themaneater.com_