MSA's safety walk notices nighttime safety problems

Many of the problems included burned out light bulbs.

By Austin Alonzo

Published Oct. 30, 2008

On Tuesday night, the Campus Safety Committee and Missouri Students Association Senate members teamed up with public safety and campus buildings officials to conduct their annual safety walk around campus.

The safety walk is held twice a year to look for problems on and around campus that could endanger students, such as malfunctioning emergency phones, burned out lights and several other infractions.

"The fall safety walk is designed so that students can come out and identify their own personal safety issues if they see any," said Megan Sparks, chairwoman for the Campus Safety Committee.

Around 8 p.m. campus employees and MSA members met in the basement of Brady Commons to separate into four different groups to cover different portions of campus and log problems in that specific area.

"It's fun for us," Sparks said. "It's kind of a big thing for the year, and we get to give little incentives like food. It's nice to feed people before they go on their hike."

Student involvement on the walk is an important factor for MSA members.

"They can voice their opinion of safety issues is they have any," Sparks said. "If they think there needs to be more lighting or if we need bushes trimmed, anything that they are concerned about they have an opportunity to come out and voice it to us and point it out to us on the walk. And our goal is to set up a situation where they feel that they can talk to us about it and we can solve those problems as soon as humanly possible."

Department of Student Services Director Jordan Paul agreed the main priority of the walk is to itemize and address problems as quickly as possible.

"We started kind of a threat classification system in the last semester based upon immediacy things that were direct for anyone walking in the area as opposed to things that maybe needed to be done the next day," Paul said.

As the groups progressed along their individual paths, they mostly noted burned out or malfunctioning lights, mostly in already well-lit areas. An exception was seven lights that were out on the light pole in the east parking lot of the Hearnes Center.

Members of the group on the southwest end of campus, including Director of Landscape Services Pete Millier and Paul, discussed the issue and decided it should be immediately addressed.

Light bulbs continually give Campus Facilities problems.

"They'll be working fine one day, and then the next they'll be out," Millier said.

Millier also noted numerous burned out bulbs in the parking lot next to Mizzou Arena and near University Hospital.

"You get a different perspective when you see things at night than you do during the day when we're here," Millier said. "You've got lights out, or if you've got a problem where there's a tree that's blocking security lighting or something like that, you can't see it during the day so you definitely want to see it at night."