SCENE THE
THE
Spring Issue 1
Feb. 22, 2019
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St. Louis Community College at Forest Park
Power outage shutters campus Substation fire cancels classes for a week
to be moved due to the temperature issues created by the power outage were moved or cared for so that they would not go bad. The Meramec campus helped to store some items … including a turtle from biology.” Campus reopened Tuesday, Feb. 19, but its electrical problems aren’t permanently fixed. By Joshua Phelps St. Louis Community College had to lease and Timothy Bold an external switch from a company in HousThe Scene staff ton to restore the power temporarily. It was It wasn’t your typical power outage. installed by Guarantee Electrical, a private Forest Park’s electrical substation caught contractor that worked with Ameren. fire on Monday, Feb. 11, closing campus for “We will start the process of designing a a week. new power substation for the campus, which “I heard from staff and students that there will take a long time,” said Paul Zinck, vice was a large boom that echoed across cam- chancellor of finance and administration for pus,” said Interim President Julie STLCC. Fickas. “I’m grateful everyone’s The college’s insurance comsafe and that Ameren UE, Guarpany deemed the old substation a antee, students and faculty showed “total loss,” he said. The cost of flexibility dealing with the whole damages and repairs still are being situation.” calculated. The vast majority of classes, Officials haven’t determined the meetings and other activities were cause of the fire. canceled. Food had to be salvaged “The wires and bars were melted in campus kitchens. Frozen pipes already, leaving no consequential burst above a computer lab and Fickas evidence,” said Joe Burns, project classroom on the third floor of D manager for Guarantee Electrical. Tower, leaking water onto computers and “I’m not sure if we’ll ever know exactly power sources. what the cause was,” said Dennis Dill, se“Some instructors were able to meet with nior manager of facilities for STLCC. “But students off-site,” Fickas wrote in the Forest we suspect it may have either been a cat or Park Weekly online newsletter for employ- a squirrel that got into the substation and ees. touched a couple of components inside.” “Budget hearings were conducted at Workers found evidence that an animal Harrison Center … and items that needed had been living in the substation, Dill said,
Photo illustration by Paul Zinck via Google
Circled in red is Forest Park’s electrical substation, which caught fire on Feb. 11, east of the staff parking lot. adding, “There was nothing left of the animal.”
Loud noise, flickering lights
Forest Park’s substation is across the road from the staff parking lot on the east side of campus, in the vicinity of the Art Annex. It stopped working in the early evening Feb. 11. Housekeeper Tiffany Beasley was emptying trash in the basement by the campus loading dock at the time. “I heard a loud pop — BOOM!” she said. “I contacted my supervisor immediately on
my walkie-talkie.” Computer lab Supervisor Melih Guzel was in the computer lab on the third floor of D Tower when the power went out. “All the lights and computers started flickering, and the whole room went dark,” he said. “I went around to see if anybody else was in the classrooms next door.” The college’s emergency backup generators kicked in long enough for police to evacuate buildings.
See Outage page 4
New health building to open this fall
A and B towers are slated for demolition By Joshua Phelps The Scene staff
Construction is moving along on the new $39 million Nursing and Health Sciences Building at Forest Park, and the contractor expects work to be completed in July. That means St. Louis Community College students in health-related fields will be taking classes in the building this fall. “We’re real excited about it,” said nursing professor Lisa Moreland. “Our students have needed some new, updated laboratory space and simulation space for quite a while.” No more classes will be held in A and B towers after spring semester, according to Paul Zinck, vice chancellor of finance and administration for STLCC. Those in non-health-related subjects will be redistributed around campus. Zinck said the college plans to demolish the two four-story brick towers by late 2020. “What should happen next fall is we will begin the process of salvage,” he said. “So we’ll try to take anything out of the buildings that we can reutilize elsewhere, and
KAI Design & Build
An artist’s rendering of a cross section of the new Nursing and Health Sciences Building’s lobbies. then we will start the process of abatement of materials that need to be abated from the building.” The 96,000-square-foot Nursing and Health Sciences Building will be four stories, mostly glass with brick accents. It’s being built north of A Tower and west of the physical education building. The new building will house modern classrooms, laboratories and offices for
nursing, dental hygiene and eight other health-related programs. “The first floor will have the dental hygiene program and the dental clinic,” Zinck said. “The second floor will have much of the nursing program, so that will include a nursing skills lab. It’ll also have the respiratory care program from Forest Park.” The second and third floors will provide space for general classrooms and comput-
er labs. The surgical technology, radiology support and EMT paramedic programs will be headquartered on the third floor. The college’s original plan included office space for STLCC Chancellor Jeff Pittman and other district employees on the fourth floor, but that has changed. “Floors one through three will be completely finished, and then the fourth floor will just have unfinished space for development at a later time,” Zinck said. The college will stay within the $39 million budget originally planned for the project, he added. The Nursing and Health Sciences Building is being constructed by Tarlton Corp., a private contractor based in St. Louis. Senior Project Manager Andrew Nelch expects it to be completed by July 15. “Right now, on the outside of the building, we’re working on installing glass,” he said. “We’re working on closing all the storm-front windows, and we have another shipment of glass for the two elevations that won’t come until the beginning of April.” Workers also are preparing to install steel panels in between glass on the outside. Inside, the company is making progress with drywall and taping on the first, second and third floors, Nelch said. Painting is un-
See Building page 4
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The Scene
THESCENEFP.COM
1/29/19 7:56 AM
Feb. 22, 2019
Campus chatter Owen Freeman, 21, cybersecurity “The hype is about this upcoming video game called Cyberpunk 2077.”
Patricia Belt, 19, fine arts “Too much booty showing all the time. It’s making them money with sponsorships. Can’t knock the hustle.”
Brianna Black, 22, general transfer “I follow Ariana Grande, and she just released a new album titled ‘thank u, next.’ She’s the second artist ever to achieve No. 1, 2 and 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.”
Bob Carmody, 61, general transfer “I’m not into Facebook or Twitter. I just got an email address.”
Holly Franklin, 19, human resources “St. Louis native Diona Brown is now blogging in The Shade Room on Instagram. It’s a social platform with 14 million followers.”
Natalia Sartin, 38, nursing “A lot of the news has been about the cold weather this winter.”
What’s trending on your social media?
Rachel Smith, 24, cybersecurity “Stories about people committing YouTube subscription channel fraud. They’re stealing people’s information and using it for their own gain.”
By Timothy Bold
Prince Reynolds, 50, Cisco Networking Academy “I only use it to stay in touch with family and friends.”
Feb. 22, 2019
Drew Pinson, 23, geography “I don’t know what the trendy news is on social media. Last summer, I completely walked away. Too much noise.”
Ethan Tutor, 19, general transfer “Vic Mignogna, voice-over for Japanese animation shows, was fired for allegedly sexually harassing women. He was terminated from Funimation and Rooster Teeth companies.”
The Scene
Tracy Graham, 17, radiology “The Democratic presidential candidates for 2020 and, of course, Trump.”
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Bryant Bell, 23, computer science “I’ve been getting a lot of news articles on human trafficking.”
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News Outage
from page 1 “The evacuation went accordingly with no injuries,” said Lt. Adis Becirovic of Campus Police. Officials assessed the situation and quickly determined that they had a big problem on their hands, said Andrew Langrehr, vice chancellor for academic affairs for STLCC. The college sent emails to students, faculty and staff every day, starting Monday, notifying them that the campus would be closed the following day, he said. Some people also received text alerts. “There was no power to the buildings, so you can’t hold classes or have people in class if your systems — including the safety systems — don’t have power,” Langrehr said. Forest Park’s substation distributes 4,160 volts of electricity around campus, compared with about 120 volts for a typical house. It took Guarantee days to rewire transmission lines, run tests and wait for the leased switch to be shipped from Houston. “It takes a lot of time to test all the components inside the substation,” Burns said. “We had to clean all the parts in order to safely test and turn it back on.”
Food salvaged, games moved
Photos by Paul Zinck
Top: Workers hoist an external switch on Feb. 14 for the electrical substation at the site of a fire that left campus without power for a week. Above: Charred remains of substation equipment.
The extended power outage required swift action by Company Kitchen, the private company that operates the cafeteria. Executive Chef Robert Klug brought in a truck with a frozen-food trailer and parked it next to the Hospitality Studies building. “It had a generator that kept everything frozen,” he said. “I had to move everything out to the truck. We lost some produce. It can’t be frozen. It had to be thrown out.” Students from the culinary arts department stopped in their kitchen daily to change dry ice for regulating food temperatures. STLCC men’s and women’s basketball teams played their home games on the Meramec campus. The dental hygiene department had to reschedule teeth-cleaning appointments at its clinic. “It was a nice little break from doing all this work,” said general transfer studies stu-
‘Hookup ID Required!’
Photo by Jonny Geigle
Communications department secretary DeJuan Baskin and surgical technology student Juri Ross rehearse a scene from “Hookup ID Required!” in the Mildred E. Bastian Center for the Performing Arts on Feb. 20. It’s the Forest Park theater department’s first production of the semester. The collection of eight short plays have themes of mistaken identity, stereotypes, unrequited love, technology and sexuality. It’s described as a “fresh look at first encounters through coffee shop meet-ups, wine bar first dates and multiple trips to the DMV.” Show times are 7:30 p.m. March 7-9 and 3 p.m. March 10. Admission is free. For more information, email director Jenna Bock at bock11@stlcc.edu.
dent Ciarra Hayl, 19. But Hayl missed a meeting with her instructor for a late-start class and didn’t get out of other class requirements. “The ones where I was not in class, they kept adding work online,” she said. “It was just a lot of work.” College employees will not suffer financially because of the power outage. “It’s handled similar to a weather closing,” Zinck said. “So if employees were scheduled to work on those days, they would be paid for those days as if they’re
days worked.” In her newsletter note, Fickas asked faculty and staff to check work areas, dispose of items that might be spoiled and report any equipment that’s no longer working properly. Zinck predicts a new electrical substation will be installed during summer semester. “It’s not a situation where the electric company will allow us to continue on a permanent basis,” Dill said. “That’s why the substation has to be replaced as soon as it can be feasibly done.”
Building derway on the second and third floors. “Once that moves along a little farther, we’ll start wrapping up things like lights, things to get ready for ceilings to start,” Nelch said. “It’s going well, but the weather makes it tricky at times.” The college has begun ordering equipment and furnishings for the new building, Zinck said. Faculty members now teaching in A and B towers will have to move after spring semester. That includes statistics professor Judy Clark, whose statistics class will go
from page 1 from the third floor of A Tower to the third floor of E tower. Clark isn’t happy about relocating, but she sees the new building as an opportunity for the college to grow and attract more students. “It’s good for the city (and) for the students who are considering a program in allied health,” she said. Moreland is particularly happy that her nursing students won’t have to do lab work on the fourth floor of C Tower and attend lectures in the basement once the new build-
KAI Design & Build
An artist’s rendering of the new Nursing and Health Sciences Building, looking south from Oakland Avenue.
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ing opens. Students also are excited about getting new digs. “I think it’s good,” said nursing major Danielle Warren, 20. “I think this building will allow us to hold a lot more students, and (they can) get their associate’s degree faster.”
“I think it’s good. I think this building will allow us to hold a lot more students, and (they can) get their associate’s degree faster.” — Nursing student Danielle Warren
KAI Design & Build
An artist’s rendering of the first-floor lobby of the new Nursing and Health Sciences Building.
The Scene
THESCENEFP.COM
Feb. 22, 2019