Students were still marching along stamped-out paths on the east side of campus Wednesday afternoon with no plow in sight. Other students walked along the plowed streets carrying shovels and dining trays preparing to dig out their cars from the snow.
Among them were freshmen Greg Liebbe and Ian Davis, telecommunications majors. Armed with a lone scraper, the two rode Ball State University's shuttles to the stadium parking lot to find it completely untouched by plows, except for the shuttle route. The snow was as high as the trunks of the cars.
Mike Planton, associate director of landscape and environmental management, said clearing the snow on campus is going very slow.
"We're making progress, and now that the sun's shining and it's not snowing, we're in pretty decent shape," he said.
The 28-person grounds crew started working early Wednesday morning and left at 3:30 p.m.
Planton said they work at night because fewer people are on campus at that time; however, he said many students were playing in the snow on Tuesday night.
"At 3 a.m. I witnessed a 40-person snowball fight over at Noyer," he said. "They looked like they were having a great time."
Two mechanics from the transportation department started plowing Scheidler Apartments' parking lots after the grounds crew left.
Mark Evans, one of the mechanics, said the grounds crew was limited to 16-hour shifts.
"Some of them only got three or four hours of sleep," he said.
They worked on Tuesday until 6:30 p.m., Planton said. They started working again at midnight Tuesday night and went home at 3:30 p.m. Wednesday, and they will be back to work 3 a.m. Thursday, he said.
The campus is split into four operating zones, and each zone has people assigned to it, he said.
"Then within each zone we decide which buildings or whatever is happening gets the highest priority," Planton said.
Residence halls are a top priority, he said.
"We do everything we can to make sure the kids who live in Johnson A and Johnson B can walk over to LaFollette and get breakfast," Planton said.
When the university changes plans on whether it is going to be open, the priorities of the grounds crew change, he said.
They work first on clearing the roads and parking lots, he said. They have also done as many doorways, steps, handicapped ramps and sidewalks as they could, he said.
"We get to a point where some of the equipment we normally use can't move the snow because it's too much," he said.
When that happens, the crew members have to get buckets and start scooping out snow by hand, he said.
"I had three very large pieces of equipment and all they did all day was clear McKinley," he said. "It took us 16 hours to get it to look like it [did]."
Thomas Kinghorn, vice president of Business Affairs, recommended the cancellation of classes to President Jo Ann Gora because of the amount of snow on campus.
"Most of the time in Indiana you can handle it with equipment that doesn't involve a whole lot of snow handling," he said, "But given the depth of the snow and the weight of it, they are using Bobcats or tractors with front loaders on them."
Another problem is that the 11 inches of snow from Tuesday and Wednesday is on top of four inches from last week, Planton said.
"Our normal places where we stockpile snow are full," he said.
Normally the grounds crew puts the snow in specific places in parking lots, he said. They plan to start hauling snow to a farm Ball State owns north of campus or to the intramural fields by Anthony Apartments on Friday, Planton said.
"It will take us a week and a half if it doesn't snow again," he said.
The long hours are wearing down the employees though, Planton said.
"People are starting to get fatigued," he said. "We've been doing this for two and half days."
The workers are less inclined to show up for overtime as it goes on. Overtime pay for the workers is probably costing the university a couple thousand dollars, Planton said.
"It's not a significant amount of money," he said.
Kinghorn said the university appreciates the work the grounds crew is doing.
"I think the most important thing to recognize is the individuals in the grounds crew that provide these services are working 16 and more hour days to get this job done," he said. "No one here works longer than the snow-removal folks."
Planton said he didn't think the blizzard was worse than the ice storm from the winter of 2004-2005.
"The ice storm did a lot more things, such as we lost trees and we lost power and basically the snow was just an inconvenience," he said. "The other things were actually damage that occurred."
He said for older people like him, the snow was not a big deal because of the winters they have seen in the past.
"It's just water," he said.
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