24’s Counter-Terrorist Unit Headquarters…errr…the Department of Facilities and Real Estate Services.

Sometimes this campus quite literally stinks.

Built on top of a city grid, Penn’s campus is naturally peppered with sewer grates. Being sewer grates, they often release a most foul odor that wafts into our nostrils and ruins the splendidly bucolic feeling of our urban oasis (as do the homeless people and muggings, but that’s for another day).

I wanted to put a stop to this olfactory offense, and then write about my heroic achievement in the DP. I had contrived a brilliant plan to solve this problem–I was going to cover these gamy grates with that great gray panacea of problem-solving: duct tape. Unfortunately, such vigilante acts of maintenance were nixed by my legal team.

Well if I can’t go in and solve the problem without really knowing what it was (hey, it worked great in Iraq, right?), then I was going to at least get to the bottom of this. I trekked down to the office of Mike Coleman, director of Operations for Penn Facilities under the Left Bank. If you haven’t been there, you should go. The place bears a striking resemblance to the fictional ministry of ass-kicking that is 24’s Counter-Terrorist Unit. An oddly-placed freestanding elevator alongside Walnut Street descends to the an extremely stylish center replete with fields of cubicles, maps everywhere, and giant view screens that would have looked more at home projecting incoming enemy ICBMs than Penn’s kilowatt-hour usage (by the way, feel free to leave your lights on, Penn’s electrical use is already well-below the targeted consumption level).

Sadly, there was no Jack Bauer. Though I suppose the flip side of this is that the office will have less of a tendency to get bombed, hacked, attacked with nerve gas, infiltrated by terrorists…oh Jack and his silly hi-jinx!

There was, however, Mike Coleman, who was kind enough to explain to me that the sewage-smell was caused by sewage (surprise!), and that the grates could not be blocked off as they were needed to provide air pressure to aid the gravity-based sewage in moving. According to Coleman, blocking the grates would be akin to putting your finger on top of a straw.

Oh.

Kind of anticlimactic, really.

Were it not for those vents, he said the sewage would not drain and build up in the pipes. I asked if this could be used to build up enough pressure under Huntsman Hall to blow it up.

“No.”

Damn!

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