University of Waterloo students forced out of residence by malfunctioning boilers

Approximately 1,400 students have been forced to find a new place to sleep due to boiler malfunctions at University of Waterloo residences.

In an email to CTV News on Wednesday, school officials wrote: “We are managing a heating outage in our UW Place residence buildings. Both boilers that supply heat to these building malfunctioned and on Monday, the buildings were too cold to allow students to sleep in them.”

The university said they are working on repairs, but they do not know how long it will take to bring the buildings back up to a suitable temperature.

In the meantime, students who had been living in those residences were forced to find somewhere else to sleep.

The school said the housing teams are working with students who don’t have friends or family nearby to find “alternative sleeping arrangements.”

“We’ve used spare accommodation that we have in the residences. We also went out to hotels in the region, to Wilfrid Laurier University, to Conestoga College, to work together as a community to find solutions. The city and the region were fantastic in helping us find quick solutions, giving us access to some Grand River Transit [buses],” said Nick Manning, University of Waterloo’s associate vice-president of communications.

He added that they have found accommodations for approximately 800 students so far, but he admitted the situation was made more challenging due to a lack of hotel room availability closer to the weekend.

In an email to CTV News, the Region of Waterloo confirmed they organized hotel accommodations with the help of some partners, including Explore Waterloo Region and the Red Cross. They also provided Grand River Transit support to move students and their belongings.

“This has been an unexpected problem that we’ve had to face in difficult financial circumstances for the university. We’re expecting significant costs from having to deal with this, but that’s secondary to making sure that students have somewhere warm, somewhere safe to sleep, and to make sure that they can access the services they need,” Manning said.

While the school works to resolve the problem, students still have access to the buildings, their personal belongings and even cook.

First year university student Xena is one of the students impacted by the sudden disruption.

“It was Monday morning that I noticed the water wasn’t as hot as usual and I checked my phone and it said that some maintenance repairs were going on with the water boiler,” she explained. “Later that day, around 8 o’clock, we were told to relocate because the water boiler and heat were out and so it’s not safe for us to stay there overnight – it can be pretty dangerous. They told us to relocate to either friends or family and, if not, to go to them and they will find us alternative accommodations. There were buses loading up some kids and there were a bunch of us just hauling bags of stuff in the snow to wherever our friends or family are.”

Xena said she was told the outage could continue until Sunday, but when asked by CTV News, the school did not provide a firm timeline for the repair work.

“We have now found some additional extra capacity boilers that we can add that’s giving us a bit of confidence going into the weekend that we’ll be able to heat the building up. We’ll be able to get students, we think in at the earliest on Sunday, but it could go a little longer as we start to integrate these new external boilers,” Manning said.

Until the repairs are complete, Xena said she is staying in a one-bedroom dorm space with a friend. But not everyone was so lucky.

“Both my roommates – one of them was struggling to find a place to go because she didn’t want to be relocated somewhere too far and then transportation gets longer to class. There’s a lot of levels to it. It’s just been really stressful for us.”