How To Plan For Your Next Rainstorm Commute
October 21, 2015 By: Lisa Danca
When Salem State commuters returned to O’Keefe parking lot after attending classes on September 30, they had no idea they would find cars flooded and totaled. Many students had to ban together to push cars out of the spontaneous made pool, and in worse cases, tow trucks were called to the scene. What started off as a rainy day resulted into a media descended event, and today I have all of your burning questions answered by Tom Torello, Vice President of Marketing and Communications, about why it happens and how our community can move forward.
Was Salem State aware of this rainstorm before it happened? Tom Torello: We knew there was going to be a storm, sure, how severe this storm was going to be, not exactly.
What will your team do to prevent this from happening? TT: Well what we always do is monitor the weather and see if there is a possibility. The flooding only happens when you have a severe downfall,like we did, and high tide. If the tide is low, the water drains off. If the tide’s high, the water can’t drain off, and not just from our lot, but the whole area around Canal Street goes into the same pipe and that pipe goes out into the ocean. If it’s hide tide, the tide blocks the pipe and the water can’t re-drain and it backs up thru our drains. So it’s not just the rain, but the rain from the whole area, pushing up thru our drains. So we’re always trying to monitor to see if the storm is going to be big enough and if it’s going to be high tide because then there is a flooding problem. Normally, we block off that area and people just park other places but because of the garage being built, and the Peabody Lot offline, we’d have to be canceling classes and that’s a pretty severe action to take. So hopefully we won’t have any more storms before the garage opens up in a few weeks. But if we do, we’ll monitor it and if we feel like there is a possibility that the flooding is going to be severe, we’ll have to cancel classes.
When will the parking garage be open? TT: It’ll be open in November. We don’t have an exact date yet, but it’s on track to be open by mid November, which is just a few weeks away from now.
How many students do you think will utilize O’Keefe after the parking garage is open? TT: It’s hard to tell. I think there will still be a lot of cars parking there, but I don’t think it will be pack like it is now, for sure. Ideally, if you’re going to class on North Campus, you’re going to use the parking garage, so I think that is going to take a lot away from O’Keefe. But it’s hard to say an exact number yet, and it’s probably going to change over time because habits take time to change. If you're used to parking there and there is parking necessarily available, you’re going to go ahead and do that. But I feel it will change over time, especially with new students coming onboard, the garage may become their first choice. I still think O’Keefe will be a busy lot, but I don’t think it will have the capacity issues we have now.
Is there an exact number of parking spaces that will be in the parking garage? TT: There’s 725 spaces in the parking garage, but will it be filled everyday? And with 725 fewer people parking there every minute, I don’t know. There will be times when there’s a capacity at both. There will be times when the parking lot is full and O’Keefe has space. We won’t know until we see how the patterns go. But it will certainly take a lot of pressure off of students by having that parking garage there. And there should be enough parking in the parking garage for everyone taking classes at North at any given time. But let’s say you have a class on North and then a class at O’Keefe, you might decide to park at O’Keefe.
How was the number of parking spaces in the parking garage determined? TT: We knew we needed enough spaces to make it worth the effort, but there also is a capacity there. It can’t go beyond the boundaries of that parking lot, so a lot of it was determined by the space available and how high we thought we could go up and still have a reasonable size building.
Is there anything else you would like me to know? TT: Just that the university feels bad about the flooding and that we should have made another call, but we didn’t unfortunately. Hopefully, that will never happen again.
Contributor’s Note: Lisa Danca has been commuting to Salem State since last semester, but fortunately her car was safe from Lake O’Keefe.