Written by Nia Mwangi, Staff Writer
People may think of the Physical Plant as the people who fix their air conditioning or anything else that goes wrong in their living area, but the Physical Plant does much more than that. While they mostly operate on work orders, the work orders placed are not solely maintenance.
The Physical Plant is made up of multiple departments: the Event Services Department, the Landscape Department, the Maintenance Department, the Construction Department and the Mechanical, Engineering and Plumbing Department. Altogether, they get about 2,000 work orders per month. This equates to at least 64 work orders per day. Usually, about 25 Physical Plant workers respond to these.
The work orders tend to vary. They can be as big as somebody requesting an event, needing trash cans and a couple of tables set out, or as small as fixing a leaky sink in an apartment. But sometimes, the work orders received can be bizarre.
“A couple of Saturdays ago, a student woke up with a snake in his apartment,” Dave Marek, assistant director of the Physical Plant, said. “We got there quickly. Once the snake was disposed of, we went around and sealed all the locations where it could possibly be getting in.”
The Physical Plant not only takes care of students’ needs but also helps everyone around campus. They take care of professors’ offices and classroom buildings, stripe the rec field and the soccer field for games, go in sewers to retrieve fallen items like keys and phones, take care of all the vehicles owned by UMHB, and set up the bleachers for the Easter Pageant as well as the set.
Much of the work of the Physical Plant is behind the scenes, but their work has a significant impact on campus. Without the Physical Plant, many things wouldn’t be able to run as smoothly. To find out more about what the Physical Plant does, visit their Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/umhbphysicalplant/
