By Matthew Sotlar / The Jambar
Youngstown State University felt the full effect of a water main break last week that left most of Youngstown and the surrounding area without water.
The first break occurred Feb. 1 when a main waterline broke on Hubbard Road in Youngstown, leaving Youngstown, Liberty and parts of Boardman without proper water pressure. A boil alert was issued at 4 p.m. for the affected areas, as well as all of YSU.
Joy Polkabla Byers, interim vice president and Dean of Students, said a crisis team was immediately dispatched when the boil alert was issued.
“Last Sunday, we were informed that there was a boil alert for the entire City of Youngstown,” Polkabla Byers said. “When that information was shared with us, we have a team that is like a crisis response team that immediately gets into a conversation of how we needed to handle that.”
Polkabla Byers said she, along with the crisis response team, worked with the Youngstown Health Department to develop an appropriate response to the boil alert.
“From my lens, I’m always thinking about campus wide from my housing to dining aspects,” Polkabla Byers said. “We worked with the health department to gather information of how we needed to operate, because regardless of what’s happening around us, we still have students who live here and eat here, so we needed to make sure that’s taken care of.”
As a result of the water main break, all of YSU’s drinking fountains were turned off across campus. After turning off the fountains, Polkabla Byers said the team worked to find accessible water for resident students.
“Fortunately, it was on a Sunday where we had a little bit of time to control what was happening,” Polkabla Byers said. “We looked at the residence halls first, so water fountains were turned off and signage was out. We pulled out different ways of providing drinks, not using water through the systems that we currently have in the dining hall, and then that allowed us to, kind of, assess what we needed to be doing when we got to campus the next day.”
While water main breaks have affected lecture and residential halls in the past, Polkabla Byers said this was one of the first times in recent memory that the entire campus was affected by a break.
“In my 21 years on campus, it’s the first time that I can remember that it affected the entire campus,” Polkabla Byers said. “We’ve had buildings that we’ve had to do things, whether it was a pipe repair or something, and so we’ve always had processes in place to be able to do that.”
The boil alert issued for YSU, Youngstown, Liberty and Boardman was lifted on Feb. 4. Polkabla Byers said after water filters around campus were changed, the water was safe to drink without boiling.
“Our water comes from the City of Youngstown, so we would allow them to do their process and inform us,” Polkabla Byers said. “Filters would need to be changed — that was one of the first things from the time the announcement came out. We needed to change filters on all of our water fountains and our systems.”
After the filters were switched out and the lines were flushed, the campuswide boil alert was lifted.
Polkabla Byers said any student concerned about water safety can email or visit the Office of the Dean of Students for more information.
