In the kitchen ceiling of law student Katrina Emmons’
Weyburn Terrace apartment, there is a rectangular hole a few inches
across and about a foot long. She said it’s been there since
early January, when workers put it there while trying to trace the
origin of a leak in the room during days of consecutive rain.
She adds she doesn’t know when someone will fill the
cavity. Maintenance employees told her they wanted to wait for more
rain before sealing it up to ascertain they had found and blocked
the source of the water, Emmons said.
The weekend before school began, Emmons noticed a large, bulbous
accumulation of water pressing against the thick white paint of her
kitchen ceiling.
She said after she called the UCLA Housing Administration to
complain, the person on duty came to her apartment. She said he
took notes and told her he would file a report.
He also used a knife from her kitchen to pop the paint bubble
and drain the liquid, she said. They placed a bucket on a chair
beneath the leak.
Emmons said she waited a couple days until she realized the
floors upstairs were becoming damp.
On the way home from school the next day, she stopped by the
Housing office at Weyburn Terrace to complain about the fact that
nothing had been done. An hour later, someone came by to assess the
problem again, Emmons said.
The next day, she came back from class, and the hole was
there.
“They just didn’t tell me anything,” Emmons
said.
“The communication has been nil, since day one.”
When she called a few days later, she said the man at the other
end of the line told her it was unlikely the hole would be fixed in
the foreseeable future because workers wanted to wait for the
rain.
Since then, it has rained three times. But the hole remains.
Emmons said she walked into her upstairs bedroom Friday to find
three workers who said they were examining the hole, which is
downstairs. They left without doing any work, she said.
She said the hole and other problems are not life-threatening
““ just hugely obnoxious. Her downstairs closet flooded
earlier in the year.
Workers who looked into the problem said a sprinkler system was
the source of the problem, Emmons said. Staff said Housing would
replace damaged valuables, but did not provide specific information
on how to claim losses, Emmons adds.
“They just say these vague things to keep you calm,”
she said.
By Charlotte Hsu, Bruin senior staff.