Workers clear parking lot entrance that was ‘slimed’

By Troy Daugherty

The slime looked like a vast pool of butterscotch pudding, oozing across the entry to the HCC north parking lot, on the evening of Sept. 9.

Red cones marked its borders. No one was around.

The next day, workers came to vacuum up the slime and power-wash the entrance to the parking lot.

This required them to block off several parking spaces with their truck, trailer and giant vacuum machine.

The blocked parking spots irritated some students.

“It’s stupid,” said Adam Kostner, Murdock. “Why not do it on the weekend when students are not going to park there?”

Mitch Wortham, Kingman, said it was a nuiscance “because I kept seeing empty spots and then would realize they were blocked off after I pulled in.”

It was unclear, at first, why the lot was slimed. As it turns out, they were not just throwing water and mud everywhere for fun.

According to Don Rose, director of facilities for HCC, they were boring.

He did not mean that they were uninteresting.

Boring is a process where they use a high-tech, hydraulic machine to push pipe and drilling mud, to tunnel underground to lay cable.

In this case they were boring under the HCC parking lot and then tunneling across the street so they did not have to actually tear up the road.

“They were putting in fiber optic cable,” Rose said.

He said that this was “not for the college” and they just happened to cross the parking lot entrance because it was on the best route for the cable. The tunneling itself was being done by Alonzo General Services, a Hutchinson contractor.

They were hired to install the fiber optics by Zayo Group, a company that installs fiber-based bandwidth infrastructure all over the United States.

So even though they were messing up the HCC parking lot and the cars that drove through the slime, it had nothing to do with the college.

Overall, it was a pain to some students, but it could have been worse.

Views: 57