Rish Hall Residents Go Without Hot Water

Bluefield College students in Rish Hall were without hot water for a few days in November.

According to students, the most challenging aspect of the water outage was having to take cold showers and the fact that they never knew what caused the problem or how long the hot water would be off.

“The water was turned off for like a week, I believe,” said Rish Hall resident Markel Locke, a sophomore on the Rams football team. “They never told us the reason for the hot water being off. I was a little upset, but there was nothing I could do about it. I just took cold showers.”

Antowyne Shaw, a resident assistant (RA) in Rish Hall, said that he, too, wasn’t sure why they had no hot water.

“(It) was off for two or three days,” Shaw said. “It may have been a pipe malfunction or something. Because the problem was with the whole building, it was the RD (resident director) who filed a maintenance request and got the problem fixed ASAP.”

While students may not have know what caused the water outage, BC administrators did. According to Chip Lambert, BC’s chief information officer, the hot water went off due to a couple of heating elements malfunctioning in the hot water system.

“From the time it was told to us to the time it took to get it fixed was probably about three days,” Lambert said. “We had to wait for the parts to come in. That unfortunately added a day to the repair.”

Logan Patron, another resident of Rish Hall, said he was without hot water for about two days, and he wasn’t very happy about it.

“I was pissed off,” Patron said, “because I had to take cold showers when it’s cold outside.”