On Wednesday, February 19th, the Saint Anselm community received text and email alerts notifying them that there would be an ongoing snow removal process in campus parking lots. It said students would have to remove cars to a temporary lot while the snow removal process occurred.

 This four-night period began the day the email was sent out, giving some students less than a half day’s notice to move their cars. Students had to move their cars out of their standard parking lot by 12:30 AM before plowing began and had to move their cars back by 7:00 AM the next day. 

Students who failed to comply with these guidelines were informed that they would be towed at their expense, ranging from $150.00 to $175.00 billed to student accounts.

 Sophomore Mackenzie O’Connor moved her car to the South Lot around 6:00 PM as there weren’t any available spots left in the designated temporary parking lots. O’Connor states, “I heard some people saying they were going to have to drive home.” While moving her car out of her usual spot, O’Connor was one of many students who had to dig or shovel their cars out of the snow to leave the lot. However, even this wasn’t enough because it required four people pushing the car out of the spot for her car to be free. O’Connor stated that she was lucky to find a freshman student who “was going around helping [people] otherwise, I don’t think I would have gotten out.” 

“When I finally found a spot in South lot,” O’Connor said, “I had to shovel it out for fear of being stuck again.” 

Help from Campus Safety and Physical Plant, according to Mackenzie O’Connor and others, was hard to come by. O’Connor mentioned that she had “previously heard they would not help, and it turned out to be true when the car next to me called them and Campus Safety did not pick up.” 

O’Connor says that there were many others in similar situations as her, voicing their grievances at the circumstances. In the end, O’Connor was out for two hours attempting to move her car: “Overall, I heard a general grumbling about the lack of notice given to the first round of people because this process was time-consuming and a hassle.” 

Another student, Justin Bergeron, notes that his experience was both positive and negative. When he saw the state of his car, he thought, “This should be fine, I’ll just sweep away the snow behind it, pull out. It’s a lot, but it’s not too bad.” 

He said, “I did my best to work quickly and chip away most of the snow which had been turned into solid ice by the freezing rain. Suffice it to say, it sucked.” But Bergeron did not let his contempt for the situation stop him from helping others. He helped other people remove snow from their cars, before returning to his own, only to find that the snow plows driving by had pushed snow up into the wheel, leaving him and others to do their best to remove frozen snow from the wheels to get their cars out of their spots.

 One particularly sour moment for Bergeron was when the people next to him left for the night; they kindly stopped by the Daley building to ask for help getting other students unstuck from their parking spots, and officers were delayed in arriving until thirty minutes later. According to Bergeron, one officer said to him and the others there at the end of the night, “If you lived in Boston, and the city plowed you in, would you call Boston civil services?” 

Bergeron was there for almost two hours as well and stated, “All night, I saw people in similar situations, just strangers helping strangers wherever they could.” 

Former commuter Colby Lynch recently moved onto campus after driving up for classes the first two and a half years of college. Lynch said, “When I heard they were doing snow removal, I figured the easiest thing would be to go home for the night to prevent having to wake up extra early to move my car back from the temporary parking.” 

Lynch was lucky enough to escape from having to dig his car out of the snow because it was equipped with four-wheel drive, but he mentioned that he “saw countless people having to push their car out of spots.” The next day, he noted that there were “a lot of people parked on the side of the road because so many spots were taken from the cars that moved there temporarily.” 

As a former commuter, Lynch wasn’t surprised to see that the next day, the “commuter lot was completely full even early in the morning.” 

Lynch recalls that the largest and most frequent problem he would encounter as a commuter was “finding a place to park where I would not get ticketed because a lot of the time, the designated lot for commuters is filled.”