In the aftermath of the East Residence Hall flood Feb. 9, some students will remain displaced for the rest of the academic year.
The flood, which the university said was due to a “harsh winter freeze,” at first led to the evacuation of the entire dorm building and left hundreds of students without a place to stay. Students took shelter in hotels, with friends and family, or on the couches of West Residence Hall. Although the Dining Commons reopened Feb. 11, students were only allowed into the dorms Feb. 12 and Feb. 13 during specific time blocks to retrieve essential belongings. Students with medication or pets inside their rooms were not able to retrieve them for hours — or in the case of medication, days.
“They were pretending that it was not a big deal at all. They didn’t take accountability for anything,” Jyeshtha Karda, a first-year UMass Boston student who is now relocated to Emerson, said in an interview. Her dorm was in the tenth-floor Blue Corridor, where the worst of the damage was located. Approximately 91 students in the same area were relocated to Emerson College Feb. 22.
Students living in the Yellow and Orange Corridors, as well as those in the Blue Corridor on the eleventh and twelfth floors, or lower rooms located near elevators, were notified Feb. 27 that they would be able to return to their rooms. The remaining displaced students in Blue Corridors who didn’t have significant damage were placed at the Charles River campus of UMass Amherst or hotels provided by Capstone On-Campus Management until the university announced March 4 that they would be offered an alternate option at Harbor Point apartments.
Karda said that the university reimbursed students with damaged items with a $500 Visa gift card, which could not be transferred to a bank account. Displaced students were also given $2,000 in dining points that could not be transferred; however, these points could not be used at Emerson College dining locations. UMass Boston students had to “go out and get our own food for the whole week,” while Emerson’s dining locations were closed for their spring break March 8-15, one week before UMass Boston’s break.
The university sent an email to affected students March 26 stating that they would receive a “credit on their housing accounts for the period during which you were unable to reside in your assigned space.” Students whose current arrangements were not “comparable to or better than” their original space would receive a credit “for the difference in cost between the two housing types for the remainder of the Spring term.”
However, transportation reimbursements for those who were relocated were only applicable for the month of February. “For me, it’s actually a little bit more expensive now,” Karda said. “Not the housing, but the commuting. I still pay the same amount, but I’m also commuting on top of that.”
The combination of improper reimbursement and lack of communication has sparked frustration and action in students, including a petition circulated in February to demand better policies from the university.
“People kept asking for money … but instead of accommodating us with money, they compensated us with dining points and gift cards,” Karda said. “Just refund people in money. All of the refunds they gave us is not money, and it’s gonna go to waste. It’s still part of the university. It’s gonna go back to them instead of us.”
