Members of the CU-Boulder Campus Community:
The opening of campus today represents an important first step toward the restoration of normal campus and academic operations. While a number of our buildings incurred minor to modest water damage, our overall physical campus infrastructure is in good shape and importantly, has been deemed to be safe for our students, faculty, and staff. As of this morning, all but one of our numerous classrooms on campus are available to our students and faculty. We do have some significant clean up and repair to attend to, but overall we are optimistic about our campus's physical infrastructure.
That said, we continue to be deeply concerned about the well-being of students, staff, and faculty who have been directly and adversely affected by the events of the last several days. Most of our campus community came through this historic weather event in reasonable shape and will have a relatively short path to normalcy. Unfortunately, there are members of the CU Boulder family who have incurred significant losses of property and emotional anguish, and who will face unusual hardships as they try to piece their lives together. We are still collecting information about the extent of this impact and encourage displaced students to contact us through the contacts listed on this website: www.colorado.edu/2013flood.
With this in mind, we are extending a plea to all of you to be understanding of, and attentive to the unusual and unfortunate circumstances that some of our students, staff and faculty will be facing in the days, weeks, and months to come. Specifically, we would like to request the following from the members of our campus community.
- To our faculty, we are asking that you be sensitive to the plight of those students whose lives have been disrupted by the events of the past few days. The unique circumstances of the last week will require your special efforts to accommodate those whose day-to-day lives have become more difficult as a result of this disaster.
- To supervisors, we are asking that you exercise compassion and flexibility in your dealings with staff who have been adversely affected by our recent weather event. Our Office of Human Resources will assist you in communicating leave policies for affected employees.
- To students, we are asking your patience in dealing with classmates, support staff, and faculty who are also recovering from this disaster. We are also asking that you be proactive in seeking any support services that you might need as a result of this natural disaster.
In the coming days and weeks we will continue to provide our campus community with information about resources that are available to aid in our recovery. You can go to http://www.colorado.edu/2013flood for current information on resources. At this time we do not anticipate the need to change the fall semester academic calendar to make up for time lost during the recent storm. It will be a long time before we are able to fully return to the business-as-usual routine that we enjoyed prior to the storm. We will get there, and we want to thank all of you for your tireless efforts last week, today, and in the days to come. You have re-affirmed what “community” really means here at CU-Boulder.
Sincerely,
Russ Moore, Provost
Paul Chinowsky, Chair, Boulder Faculty Assembly