Campus copes with heatwave; newly installed AC systems provide relief

Friday Sept. 6, Eddie Dong (senior) laid down with a book at the Del Mendel Aquatics Center, seeking respite from the unrelenting heat wave that had struck Los Angeles.

“We’re having four straight days of triple-digit temperatures,” Dong said. “I’m at the pool to cool off.”

Both Occidental College and Los Angeles County announced an excessive heat warning Tuesday Sept. 3, with peak temperatures expected on Thursday and Friday. According to the National Weather Service, temperatures reached up to 112 degrees in certain parts of the Western San Fernando Valley.

This is not the first heat wave this campus has seen in recent years, with a previous heat wave in 2022 pushing students with no air conditioning in their dorms to sleep in the Tiger Cooler.

Francis Briones (senior) said she doesn’t feel too bothered by the heat.

“I grew up in Florida in the sun,” she said. “It’s just these Californians.”

AC Updates

Unlike previous heat waves where residents in six of 13 dorms had un-air conditioned rooms, residents in Stewart-Cleland Hall, Pauley Hall and Berkus House now have air conditioning — which was installed this past summer, according to Director of Residential Education Isaiah Thomas.

Thomas said that the new air conditioning was installed as part of Occidental’s Integrated Strategic Plan and the Occidental Promise.

“Former college President Harry Elam, college senior leadership and the Board of Trustees identified adding air conditioning as a priority for elevating the student experience and revived pre-pandemic plans,” Thomas said via email.

According to Thomas, the combined cost of the project was approximately $3.6M for all three buildings.

In Fall 2023, the college installed temporary air conditioning units in every dorm without central air conditioning to cool community lounge spaces and hallways. Haines, Stearns and Chilcott remain the only three dorms without central air conditioning.

“I think it’s about damn time,” Kali Stephens (senior), who lived in an un-air-conditioned Stewart-Cleland Hall her first year, said.

Stephens said that while she never witnessed any medical emergencies during her time in Stewart-Cleland, it was impossible to sleep when it was so hot.

Stephens said that she is happy for the first years but also feels that living in a dorm without air conditioning was part of the first-year experience.

“You know, everyone has to pay their dues a little bit,” she said. “But times are changing.”

Calvin Goodman (senior), who lived in an un-air-conditioned Pauley Hall sophomore year, said that he spent as little time inside as he could during the heat wave in 2022.

Goodman said that his friends and family were surprised to hear that some of the dorms at Occidental still did not have air conditioning.

“I’m just happy that people have it now,” Goodman said. “I think it should’ve happened a long, long time ago.”

Abi Forgue (senior) said that, as a first-year student living in a dorm with no air conditioning, the heat drove students away from their dorms, making it more difficult to adjust to college.

“It made us find places elsewhere to hang, so it’s good [that first-years] get to stay in their spaces,” Forgue said.

Living in a forced triple also made Forgue’s situation worse, as they said the body heat in the room added to the discomfort.

“It was very, very, very, very hot,” Forgue said.

James Brammer (junior) said that he believes pain is in the mind.

“What heat?” Brammer said. “If you do not think, you do not feel. I sense no pain. I fear nothing. People in the world have to live with this heat every day of the year, and if someone complains about the heat, they just need to deal with it.”

Ben Langer Weida (senior) currently lives in Haines, where large tubes pump cool air into the hallways of the residence hall, a part of the temporary air conditioning initiative. He opens his door to let the cooler air from the hall flow into his room.

“I would like to be able to have a private room,” Langer Weida said. “Like, to not have to have my door open all the time [just] to exist in a space that I’m living and paying for.”

Langer Weida, too, said that air conditioning should have been installed in all the dorms years ago.

“I mean, it’s not going to get any colder,” Langer Weida said. “That’s all I’m going to say.”

Community Coping

College Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Amos Himmelstein, wore a bucket hat and stood on the Academic quad handing out free popsicles. Accompanying him Thursday afternoon were other vice presidents of the college: Vice President of ITS James Uhrich; Vice President of Enrollment Maricela Martinez; Vice President of Institutional Advancement Suzy LaCroix and Chief of Staff Lindsay Nyquist.

“[We’re] just a bunch of cool people who wanna give out popsicles,” Himmelstein said. “Just popsicle lovers.”

The following day, members of Oxy Rugby stood out on the quad selling snow cones. Sarah Titcombe (senior), co-captain of Oxy Rugby, was one of them.

“It’s really hot out, obviously, and it’s a good opportunity to both make money but also meet people in the second week,” Titcombe said. “Especially people who are interested in joining rugby.”

Elsewhere in the Johnson Global Forum, Resident Associate Professor, Mathematics, Jeff Miller stood chatting to a circle of students at the Math Ice Cream Social, spoon in hand. Their annual event moved indoors from its usual location of Mosher Patio in an attempt to save the ice cream from melting in hot temperatures, according to an email sent the previous day by the department.

While no free movie tickets were offered by the college this year, the Tiger Cooler stocked their smart fridges with a new offering of hydration packs to help students cope with the heat.

According to Katie Valdes, the registered dietitian on campus, each hydration pack contains four DripDrops, one Bonk Breaker Energy Chews and one pickle product. Each pack cost $56, or $28 on a meal plan.

Valdes said that while the hydration packs were originally made for athletes to help with rehydration, she decided to make them available to all students and staff on campus after her boss saw that it was necessary under the current circumstances.

“The DripDrop acts similarly to a Gatorade or a Powerade, but it has 670 milligrams of sodium,” Valdes said. “Pour it in your water bottle with 16 ounces [of water].”

Valdes said that if someone is watching their sodium intake but still wants to be hydrated, they could try the pickle shot, which has only 410 miilligrams of sodium in it.

“There are electrolytes in the [Bonk Breaker] Chews,” Valdes said. “This is something that you could drink with water [because] the electrolytes help you retain the water.”

To stay healthy during heatwaves, Valdes said that people should be drinking at least half their body weight in ounces. Valdes said she also recommends drinking a mixture of fluids — not just water — because water simply leaves your body if it doesn’t have anything to retain it.

“So if you weigh 150 pounds, make sure you have a fluid intake of 75 ounces,” Valdes said. “And that doesn’t have to be just water. It can be sports drinks, fruit, broth-based soups — all those things.”

Athletics

Tom Stritikus, president of Occidental College, said that the heat wave has affected his regular exercise routine.

“I usually play tennis in the evenings, and [during the heat wave] it’s too hot for me to play tennis in the evenings,” Stritikus said.

Cross country’s Grace Optekar (junior) hit the ground running at Patterson Field at the break of dawn Thursday Sept. 5. She said that her training was moved up from its usual time of 5 p.m. to 6 a.m. — and that it was still 80 degrees outside.

The same day, Oxy Athletics sent out an email to the student body to announce that open swim hours through the rest of the week would be moved up to 9 a.m. and closing before noon— citing the safety and well-being of the lifeguard staff and patrons as the reason for this change. The email stated that all open swim hours would be subject to modification or cancellation as they continued to monitor temperatures.

Looking Forward

David Caldwell, director of Facilities Management, said that his biggest concern during the heat wave is the risk of a power outage in the city of LA.

“Any time it gets hot, air conditioners get taxed, and they can slow down or break,” Caldwell said. “When everyone in LA turns their [AC] up you can get a short or a brownout.”

Caldwell said that since the risk of a power outage would be an LA issue rather than a campus one, there’s nothing that the college can do other than be ready to respond. There were power outages in the Northeast LA area during the heat wave, including in Highland Park and Eagle Rock.

Joshua McGuffie, an Urban & Environmental Policy visiting instructor who grew up in Los Angeles, said that the heat has worsened since his childhood.

“I remember flying back home from visiting family in Canada and landing in LAX […] and I can still remember the smell of hot asphalt,” McGuffie said.

McGuffie said that back then, the temperature in LA and Pasadena would stay in the 90-degree range around this time of year. Nowadays, it’s normal for the temperature to reach over 100 or even 110 degrees during September.

“We didn’t need our AC in the house that I grew up in every day, but now the house that I live in, we run our AC all the time,” McGuffie. “That’s a change over four decades.”

McGuffie said that he hopes students are interested in researching how to reorganize our lives and our culture in a way that is more sustainable.

“Climate change can create so much fear and so much angst — it’s traumatic,” McGuffie said. “But there’s this great opportunity to actually address it in realistic ways — not in tragically tech-bro, late-stage capitalism, ‘We’re going to spend our way out of this, but only the top 1% [of us]’ [kind of ways].”

Instead, McGuffie said he would like students to think about ways to create equity for people who don’t have access to climate resilience spaces or ways to reimagine cities, agricultural and wild spaces so that they’re more resilient for climate change.

“The horrors of climate change are coming,” McGuffie. “Climate change is the heat wave.”

Contact Michelle Teh at teh@oxy.edu.