Winter in Illinois brings along a heaping pile of problems.  

From frozen pipes bursting, to car batteries dying to the ridiculous rise in electrical bills, the cold brings a heavy maintenance period alongside those heavy winds. 

One major, wintry issue seems to sparkle the brightest around college campuses: ice.  

With thousands of students and hundreds of staff living and working on campus, covered roads, slippery sidewalks and snow-packed parking lots are a big deal when snowstorms come to town.  

But rolling out as early as 3 a.m. like the Avengers, EIU’s facilities, planning and management employees show up and tackle the harsh conditions. 

However, facilities is being faced with more than just wind chill, snow piles and ice sheets. 

Facilities is stuck using old, broken equipment to try and get the job done.  

Beating ice is done with two main factors: brine and salt, grounds foreman Jeff Browning said.

Brine is put down ahead of time on walkways and parking lots to stop ice from forming and to help break up the snow for plowing. Salt is used on existing ice to melt it down into brine. 

For maintenance worker Eric Hiltner, cold control all starts with making that brine—a mixture of diluted salt and water.  

Nicknamed the brine guru, Hiltner said managing snowstorms can be quite a task.  

The brine used at EIU is mixed so as not to freeze above negative 6 degrees Fahrenheit. Any colder than that and the brine will be ineffective.

He said making brine is supposed to be a passive process, running in the background.  

A salt mixer is filled with salt, water is used to break that salt down and the brine flows into an overflow tank. Making 250 gallons of brine, Hiltner said, takes around an hour and a half. 

Or that’s what’s supposed to happen. 

However, the salt mixer EIU has is third hand, he said, being bought new by a company in Champaign, then used by a company in Charleston and now being used by EIU. 

“It’s been through the wringer,” Hiltner said. “I don’t know how old it is. It’s got leaks. It’s got all sorts of issues.” 

Leaks complicate the straightforward process of brine making. If a leak happens, the mixture can freeze and must be broken up by hand.  

As a solution, Hiltner constantly monitors the brine. He said he checks it every five minutes to make sure it hasn’t started leaking or overflowing. 

Browning said generally, facilities can get through laying down brine quickly if everything goes right. But that does not apply to all snowstorms. 

“The last snow we had, we couldn’t keep up with it if we tried,” he said. “It just kept piling back on top of us.” 

Brine making issues aside, once facilities has brine, they have to spray it. 

 In total, facilities has eight pieces of equipment that can spray brine or salt. 

There are two plow trucks with salt sprayers on the back, a relatively new pull-behind tank sprayer, two 50-gallon sprayers, a sprayer with a flood tip, a 25-gallon sprayer that is slow but new, and a drop spreader.  

Of these, the quality varies. Several are rusted and corroding, several spray slowly and almost all of them are second hand and getting older by the day.  

To combat this, Hiltner has been building another sprayer from scratch.  

“It’s been a process,” he said. “I’ve been learning a lot about engineering and plumbing.” 

He said he had the homemade sprayer was working with water, able to disperse eight gallons a minute, but the pulley inside the mechanism broke.  

As impressive as it is, needing to build a custom sprayer to keep ice off campus is unacceptable.  

But moving on from sprayers, there are other pieces of crucial equipment for snow and ice removal, one of the main ones being the snowplows and trucks that maintenance uses. 

For Hiltner and the others, the plows at EIU range from inconsistent to nonfunctional depending on the day.  

One day earlier this semester, Hiltner said he was out plowing and spraying when his plow died 15 minutes after starting. He took the truck to be looked at, where it was found that there were corroded wires in the control box. 

They fixed the wires, and he went back out.  

Five minutes later, the truck was down again. A wire that powered the plow was corroded too. This was not the first time the wires in the plow had been repaired.  

Luckily for this truck, a new harness was ordered this time around.  

This is the story of every time facilities has to take the trucks out, Hiltner said. Several times the batteries on the truck have died after two hours of use.  

Hiltner and Browning said they weren’t sure how old the truck was, with both the truck and plow being bought second hand, they said.  

“If the controller is corroding apart, it’s been here a while,” Browning said.  

In total, Hiltner and Browning said facilities can never have out all eight tools because of recurring issues with the tools themselves.  

When ice hit in mid January, Browning said there were three sprayers and two trucks going to cover all of campus, University Court, Greek Court and then some.  

Maintenance is working hard with what they have. But what they have is not good enough.  

Non-functional snowplows, rusted wires and homemade sprayers cannot be what EIU is giving the first line of defense against storms, breaks, floods and cracks. 

Ice on campus is an accessibility issue. Ice on campus is dangerous. Ice on campus can be controlled. 

But if facilities don’t have the resources and need to DIY fix or make the tools needed to do the job, how can they be expected to maintain control? 

“We’re just battling what we can battle,” Browning said. “We hope to keep the kids, staff safe.” 

EIU must take better care of the groundskeepers that take care of us.

The Editorial Staff can be reached at 581-2812 or at deneic@gmail.com.