This vomit has remained at the bottom of a flight of stairs in the South Campus Dining Hall that leads to third-floor offices owned by Stamp Student Union for more than a month. The two departments have disputed who is responsible for cleaning the mess.
More than a month ago, someone at the South Campus Dining Hall lost control of his or her stomach, splashing its contents at the bottom of a stairwell to the third floor on the building’s east end.
As of last night, the bright pink splatter appeared to have been augmented by a second bout of vomiting and treated with bleach, but it was otherwise undisturbed as different departments dispute who is responsible for cleaning it up.
Although the vomit is in the dining hall building, Dining Services spokesman Bart Hipple said, it is actually Stamp Student Union — which owns the dining hall’s third-floor office space — that is responsible for keeping the stairwell clean.
“As soon as you walk through those black doors, that’s where we end,” Hipple said of the doors from the dining area by the Gazebo Room toward the stairway.
But Steve Gnadt, the associate facilities director for Stamp, told it differently, saying the student union is only responsible for the offices and hallways on the building’s top floor, which he said are cleaned at least once a day.
In fact, he added, when the counseling center was temporarily moved to the third floor, Dining Services took responsibility for painting over graffiti in one of the building’s stairwells.
“We are responsible for the third floor and the third floor only,” Gnadt said.
Because the vomit is in an area used primarily for access to the third-floor offices, few regular patrons at the dining hall had noticed it. But once they heard about the mess, many said it should have been cleaned up long ago.
“That’s disgusting. I’m surprised it doesn’t smell as bad in here as you think it would,” sophomore neurobiology and physiology major Lauren Geffen said. “That’s really gross.”
Another university department came under scrutiny for similar sanitation problems last year, after employees of the Department of Transportation Services complained that vomit on Shuttle-UM buses was not being thoroughly cleaned. The Maryland Occupational Safety and Health agency investigated and ultimately determined that DOTS’ vomit cleanup policy met state standards.
Eric Uttenreither, the assistant commissioner for MOSH, said the agency would only step in to investigate if an employee made a complaint, as was the case with the DOTS incident.
While the DOTS employees had said the vomit put them at risk for HIV or hepatitis, Uttenreither said he was not aware of any serious health hazards associated with vomit or any standard guidelines for cleaning it up in public buildings.
“The only hazard I can see it being is as a slipping hazard,” Uttenreither said. “It’s still very odd. It’s such an easy thing to take care of.”
He added that this “odd” problem was still something that should have already been addressed.
“Owning-a-business-wise, you should be able to have someone come in and clean that up right away,” he said.
And upon seeing the mess, several students agreed.
“Maybe they should have DOTS come and clean it up, since they know all about vomit,” junior marketing and information systems major Michael Haber said.
According to Hipple, Dining Services does not have any regular janitors or housemaids assigned to the South Campus Dining Hall. Instead, the cooks and line servers rotate in taking care of the facility’s serving and seating areas, but they stay within the cafeteria section of the building.
“Our staff has no reason to be going in and out through that set of doors,” Hipple said on Friday, but added, “It is our belief that if we saw something like that, we’d understand that it reflects on us nonetheless and it would have been quickly taken care of.”
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