Nicknamed the ‘drunk stairs’ by residents of Flint and Day halls on Mount Olympus, these stairs have some sober students grabbing for the railing.

‘One time, I saw a step break underneath a girl; it snapped in half,’ said junior Neeraj Agrawal, a former Mount resident. ‘Everyone has seen someone fall through the stairs – everybody.’

Although the first flight of the stairs was replaced last spring, some students this semester still feel as though the stairs are unstable.

‘I don’t like them – they shake,’ said sophomore Sharon Lee, who lives in Day. ‘They’re not sturdy.’

The stairs, which lead to the Mount, are located just off a road by the tennis courts and the Women’s Building. Many Flint and Day residents use these stairs because there are fewer steps than the main staircase behind Carnegie Library and because they are closer to some locations on campus.

Unlike the main staircase, the wooden ‘drunk stairs’ zigzag and are slightly steeper. Also, the stairs are not covered by roofing or walls, leaving them vulnerable to rain and snow.

The campus maintenance crews are divided into zones that cover different areas of the campus. Each zone maintains and repairs its specific area. The drunk stairs fall into a neutral area between zones, said west zone maintenance supervisor Rick Bowles.

While grounds crews are responsible for maintenance of the stairs and make rounds through the area every day, the crew does not have the immediate ability to repair them when a problem is found, Bowles said. The crew must call a nearby zone for a carpenter or a machinist to make the repairs.

A lot of the repairs that the crews make are due to vandalism, Bowles said, including the replacement of the entire first flight of stairs last spring.

‘If there are any repairs that are needed due to vandalism or what have you,’ he said, ‘they’ll call it out to whoever has an available carpenter that can get on it ASAP.’

Some of the other repairs are performed as a result of normal wear and tear.

‘The grounds crews are doing daily runs, so if there’s something that doesn’t seem right to them or whoever may be walking the stairs, they’ll call it in and we’ll get somebody over there,’ Bowles said.

Aside from some instability, students had other complaints about the stairs.

‘When they get wet, they get pretty slippery and they shake a little if you get a few too many people on at once,’ said Carter Bailey, a State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry freshman living in Flint.

‘Every third or fourth step was loose,’ said Mark Vyzas, a sophomore who lived in Flint last year. ‘There’s one step that leans down, and I guess I stepped on it wrong, and it was slippery and I fell.’

Chuck Raye, a sophomore who lived on the Mount last year, said he fell on the concrete slope at the base of the stairs last semester and tore his ACL, a ligament in the knee. Raye had to have surgery a month later and has continued taking physical therapy.

Yet some students opt to take the stairs because they are shorter than the main stairs.

‘They tend to shake, but I mean, I’m not really worried about it,’ said freshman Andrew Reich. ‘I’ve never really had any problems with them.’

Published on October 21, 2007 at 12:00 pm