Complaints from Mathey and Rockefeller College students prompted University officials to rein in some early-morning construction work on Hamilton Hall, but the noise is unlikely to go away anytime soon.
"The drilling is literally a few feet from my window," said Emmelyn Stevens '09, who lives in Campbell Hall.
Facilities Department policy states that "no construction projects should begin before 8 a.m. daily," but students reported jackhammer, drilling and vehicle noise nearly an hour earlier.
"Some new contractors didn't get the message" about early-morning construction work, said University field manager Craig Willet, who oversees the Hamilton project. He said complaints from students and the Mathey College administration alerted him to the problem.
Mathey College Master Antoine Kahn said workers on the Hamilton project would comply with University policy from now on.
"We talked to the University and they told the workers that they should not be starting before 8 a.m.," he said. "The situation should now be under control."
However, Willet cautioned that morning construction would still take place.
"These are all union projects and the workers have set hours on their contracts," he said. "If they start working later in the morning, we either have to pay a lot of money for keeping them overtime or we have to accept a shorter workday."
Irvin Moore, senior project superintendent, offered another perspective.
"These workers have families, and the later they start in the morning, the later they get back home at night," Moore said. "It takes us an hour and a half to get here, so we have to leave at a decent hour."
The project, which began over the summer and will not be completed until next fall, involves a "total demolition and rebuild," according to Moore.
Willet outlined the changes students can expect in the renovated building. "The Mathey office will be moved from the ground floor to the second floor, and a larger mail room will be put in," he said. "There will also be a connection between the ground floor of Hamilton and the Mathey library."
Many students said they were not aware of the purpose of the construction project.
"They won't even tell us what the construction is for," Mary Huang '09 said. "Maybe if they told us what they were building and that it was for a good cause I would be more understanding."
Aside from a construction alert on the Facilities Department website, students were given no advance notification of the project, so most were not aware of it before arriving on campus in September.
The site warns students to "expect construction noise, dust and heavy truck traffic in this area."
Willet said the current jackhammer noise is due to the "lowering of the [basement] in order to create more floor-to-ceiling height."
The good news is that the jackhammers will stop within the next month. The bad news is that the electric saws will then start running.
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