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5 Grounds crew defeats another winter 20 2014
by DREW EDMONDS Staff Reporter
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n Feb. 11, 2014, President George Bridges held a lunch to honor the heroic efforts of Physical Plant employees, specifically members of the grounds crew, during the past couple weeks of harsh winter conditions. The event served to commemorate all of the people who maintain campus behind the scenes. These individuals work under the radar, sometimes starting their shifts as early as 3 a.m. in order to finish before students start their day. They are tasked with preserving an attractive environment without anybody noticing, regardless of what the weather throws at them. “You see people out there plowing snow for your sidewalks in the winter, and they become noticeable, but they blend in when they are just picking up leaves and trimming the shrubs. The same people are there working hard all year long,” said Maintenance Supervisor Randy Coleman, who has held his position for the past 10 years at Whitman. The Physical Plant itself is divided into three sections. The maintenance staff take care of all the buildings on campus, the grounds crew is in charge of the exterior campus and the academic custodians are focused on janitorial services. Coleman, who started out as a heating, ventilation and air conditioning technician, has learned to meet the high demands of students and faculty on campus. “One of the biggest challenges in the maintenance department is trying to respond to everybody’s needs quickly,” said Coleman. The recent snowstorm has
topped the charts for some Whitman students since they arrived in Walla Walla, but Physical Plant employees maintain that the snow this winter is nothing special. Grounds Supervisor Bob Biles has been working at Whitman for just under 20 years. “If you take all the people that are on my crew, we have well over 100 years of combined experience on this campus. There’s nothing that we haven’t really seen,” he said. As temperatures start to drop, and the snow starts falling in early winter every year, the maintenance team’s biggest worry is the heating and piping throughout the buildings. About five years ago, Coleman recalls, the sprinkler pipes froze in the attic of Lyman House. The ice expanded, splitting the pipes and flooding an entire section of all four floors of the building. Remembering the difficulty of separating and sorting students’ damaged personal items, Coleman says that now they monitor the sprinkler system much more closely. For Coleman’s department, the responsibilities and challenges remain fairly consistent year round, but Biles tells a different story. Every year is a little bit different, he says, but the grounds crew always operates on a three-season cycle. Beginning with growing season in the middle of March through most of October, Biles’s team of eight full-time employees, all with over 10 years of experience, work to nurture the plants and trees concentrated on campus. The team then deals with leaves in the fall until December, when they change their mechanical equip-
ment for snow and ice removal. The name of the game for Biles’s team is flexibility. “All of us are always on call,” said Biles. “The past couple of weeks we’ve often been in around 3 a.m. It’s kind of a minute-by-minute deal.” With only eight full-time workers on his crew, Biles is often forced to make decisions about how he allocates his labor. The school’s progressive sick leave policy, where staff are allowed four weeks paid vacation and one day per month in sick leave, does not always help. “I’m not saying it’s a problem, but the sick leave policy can create a dilemma,” said Biles. “We have just enough people. We don’t have any excess in labor. If somebody is sick or hurt or pulled away because of a family situation that puts an extra burden on us.” The recent snowfall certainly meant longer days for grounds crew members, but it’s nothing compared to what they have seen in the past. Challenging winter circumstances are a frequent occurrence in Walla Walla, stretching back to Biles’s first couple days on the job. Eighteen years ago, it was 10 degrees below zero, and ice began to form all across campus. After a few hours, the ice had grown 4 inches thick. “The entire physical plant was out there with ice picks trying to chip ice off the sidewalk. That was probably the worst thing that I’ve encountered,” he said. Now, with temperatures finally rising, Biles and his team can rest easy. For the grounds crew, the change of pace from plowing snow to mowing lawns and getting ready to start planting flowers will be nothing short of refreshing.
President George Bridges (middle photo) converses with Physical Plant staff at a lunch celebrating their hard work through the snowy winter months. Photos by Marcovici
Organic garden weathers snowfall, waits for spring by LANE BARTON Staff Reporter
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The organic garden’s caretakers use techniques like “cover crops” and “cold frames” to combat the cold weather. Photos by Marcovici
ith snow falling hard last week, many students had to adjust to the cold realities of winter in Walla Walla, but for the organic garden and its caretakers, this kind of snowfall is just another part of their seasonal cycle. Due to the naturally cold winters in Walla Walla and the frequency of snow blocking out sunlight, the garden usually lays dormant for approximately four months of the year. “[Students] pretty much put [the garden] to sleep and just walk away from it from the middle of November until the middle of March,” said Landscape Supervisor Bob Biles. But while no active caretaking is undergone during these winter months, steps are taken in the fall to prepare the garden for the following spring. “During the winter we do cover crop ... we use peas and will plant them in the fall before the ground freezes, and they’ll hibernate when it snows and then start growing in the spring,” said senior Genevieve Jones, head of the Organic Garden Club. “They’ll put nitrogen back in the soil so that when we start our crop rotation, the soil is more replenished.” While cover crops are the technique of choice for the Organic Garden Club during winter, they have also used other options to combat the cold. One method is a cold frame, or a wooden box designed to insulate anything that it covers, which was recently designed by a member of the club to increase the growing duration of a small crop. Another more ambitious project that Biles, Jones and other members of the Organic Garden Club have discussed is the pos-
sibility of creating hoop houses for use during the winter months. These houses would use multiple hooped coverings to create zones of insulation to protect plants during cold weather. Hoop houses can be big enough to cover large amounts of crops, creating a possible avenue to continue production from November to March. But Biles notes this is a complicated project, and not something the Organic Garden Club is capable of doing immediately. “Actually having some sophisticated infrastructure is kind of beyond their capacity,” said Biles. Beyond the capability of building the houses, there is also the question of how they would be managed. One major challenge for the organic garden is that students are not around all year—winter break especially poses a problem for garden caretakers. The increased need to protect crops from the cold combined with decreased volunteers on campus would make it difficult to maintain the garden during this time, even if something like a hoop house was built. Additionally, there are other practical matters the Organic Garden Club needs to address in order to help the garden during more productive times than winter. “Even before the hooped beds, we’d probably go for some new irrigation drip tape, because our drip tape is pretty chewed through. So that might come before the project,” said Jones. While the possibility of hoop houses to help with winter growing is intriguing, it is unlikely to come to fruition until a member of the club sets out to complete what Jones estimates to be a two-year project. In the meantime, the organic garden will do exactly what it does every winter and wait out the cold snow until the warmth of spring arrives.