UCLA Store gets a soggy wake-up call
At an hour when most students still lay sleeping in bed, a minor drama unfolded on the A-level of Ackerman Union early Monday morning.
It was 6:15 a.m., and water was spraying into the UCLA Store.
While working on the fire sprinkler system of the future Jamba Juice eatery, to be debuted in mid-May, the work crew took off a sprinkler head, releasing a spray of running water.
The resulting shower seeped through the floor, which had not yet been sealed, and into the market area of the UCLA Store one level below.
“It was not a deluge of water, but it certainly was a problem,” said Roy Champawat, a UCLA food service director. “(Somewhere between) two to 10 gallons escaped before they were able to stop it.”
The water leakage caused minor damage to the merchandise in the UCLA Store, particularly the gift cards in the market area, some of which had to be thrown out.
UCLA Store manager Jan Griwach said the damage amounted to around $1,350 in repairs.
Associated Students UCLA representatives said there was no extensive damage done to the Jamba Juice work site.
In order to reduce the damage, store workers draped tarps over the shelving units and closed off the market area for a few hours. Because the leakage began early in the morning, they were able to reopen the market area to the public by 9:30 a.m., which Griwach said prevented any substantial reduction in sales.
“We do get a few customers who come in for breakfast items and such in the morning, so we did lose some (financial) volume, but overall we had a good day,” Griwach said.
Though neither Griwach nor Student Union Director Jerry Mann could recall a recent time when similar water damage occurred, Mann said water leakage was not a rare occurrence.
“With a building like Ackerman, where you have multiple floors and multiple functions from time to time, flooding happens,” Mann said.
“We have food service on two of the five floors, and whether it’s because of construction, a drain that gets clogged, or a pipe that breaks, you’ll have floods from time to time. We just have to take preventative measures and act quickly to deal with the problems when they do occur,” he said.
Currently, ASUCLA representatives are unsure if they will seek reparations from the construction team, Mann said.
Champawat said the water leakage would not affect the construction timeline of the Jamba Juice restaurant, though construction can be hard to predict.
He estimated a high amount of success for the future Jamba Juice, which will provide a lounge for students to relax and study.
Champawat added that the UCLA venue will consist of Jamba Juice’s largest seating area across the nation.
With the beginning of construction for Jamba Juice in late February, ASUCLA moved the X-Cape arcade to the Viewpoint Lounge, eliciting mixed responses of regret and ambivalence from students.
Mann said most of the reactions from students have reflected a strong desire to return the Viewpoint Lounge back to a quiet study space.
“Right now, we’re still in the process of examining how well the video game X-Cape concept works in the Viewpoint Lounge,” Mann said. “We’re definitely going to put PC or online gaming in the remodeled Cooperage, but whether we maintain the X-Cape video console game concept is what we’re going to be looking at over the course of the next few months.”
For ASUCLA, the decision to keep or get rid of X-Cape is a matter of deciding whether or not the lounge space should be used as a way to generate revenue or to serve the students as a study area.
The X-Cape arcade generates revenue through a commission that the console vendor pays ASUCLA, which helps to offset the cost of maintaining the arcade area, Mann said. He did not have any specific figures relating to the commissions received.
For now, the X-Cape arcade will remain in the Viewpoint Lounge until the new Cooperage opens this fall, by which time ASUCLA representatives expect to have made their final decision.
