This past week, Route 322 was shut down between the hours of 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. due to major construction along the road. The project was a long time in the making and was intended to smooth out the bumpy, rutted surface of the highway. Because Route 322 is the main route through campus, students had very strong opinions about how this closure affected the traffic, as well as their sleep.
Every night of the week there is a crew of students who volunteer at Rowan EMS to answer emergency calls on the Rowan University campus. They drive the ambulance all along Route 322 in order to answer calls and drive students to the hospital. The road construction starting at 8 p.m. has been a nightmare for the EMS crews.
Salvatore Toppi, a sophomore business major at Rowan, has been volunteering with the campus EMS squad since last year, and he hasn’t had to deal with a problem like this before.
“We got a call at 2 a.m., and we could not take our normal route to the station,” Toppi said. “The road to the station was blocked, so we had to take an alternate route which involved a little driving on the sidewalk through campus in order to answer the call at Edgewood.”
While Rowan EMS had planned for an event like this beforehand, it did not make the alternate route any easier or any less of a pain. The crew decided to sleep at the station in order to improve their response time and avoid the construction. And even though the construction was a nuisance, no patients were negatively impacted during the process.
Traffic wasn’t the only problem faced by people on campus. Students have been complaining about the noise of the construction. Because the roads were closed overnight, the construction had been taking place at odd hours.
Marisa Brownstein, a sophomore human resources management major, lives in the Rowan Boulevard Apartments, and her window looked out onto the street where the construction took place.
“They woke me up at 4:30 a.m.,” Brownstein said. “I had a class at 9:30 a.m. that morning and I couldn’t go back to sleep so I was falling asleep all day.”
Brownstein is not the first student to have complained about the noise level. Students in the Townhouse Apartments were also woken up by the noise.
Construction officially ended last Friday night.
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