Roughly 300 students living on Broad St. between West Kendrick Ave. and College St. lost water access twice last week, first when a water main broke in front of 94 Broad St. on Friday, Sept. 9, and again two days later when a main broke near 66 Broad St. on Sunday, Sept. 11.

Both disruptions were announced by Joe Hernon — associate vice president for emergency management, campus safety, and environmental health and safety — in emails to the Colgate community. The Village of Hamilton initially notified the University of both breaks, and a boil water notice was not issued on either day.

Water service was restored by 6:15 pm on Friday, roughly seven hours after the break was announced. Sunday’s disruption was shorter; service was restored less than two hours later.

Hernon’s emails encouraged affected students to use Case Library, James C. Colgate Hall and the Reid Athletic Center for bathroom facilities, as well as Huntington Gymnasium for showers.

“As you see kind of cross-country, water infrastructure can be outdated, and so it does tend to break,” Hernon said on Friday afternoon. “This is might be one of those unfortunate cases but we don’t have a cause at this time.”

Senior Dassie Spivack, director of facility operations for 84 Broad St. (Delta Delta Delta), said she faced several inconveniences following Friday’s main break. After water that was already in the pipes before access was shut off ran out, residents of the Greek life house only had access to water stored in jugs.

“It was an issue of cleaning things up,” Spivack said. “In the beginning, we kind of forgot about it, so we were using regular plates but we couldn’t wash them, […] so we pretty quickly switched over to single-use paper plates and stuff like that.”

Delta Delta Delta shut down their in-house kitchen because they couldn’t sanitize surfaces. The students also lost access to their bathroom water, forcing them to shower in the apartments and townhouses nearby.

“Luckily it turned back on around 5 pm or 6 pm,” Spivack said, “but when it did turn back on it still wasn’t usable. It was still really brown, so it took another hour or so to even be usable after it turned back on.”

Elsa O’Brien, a sophomore living in the Creative Arts theme house on 100 Broad St., said that Sunday’s water main break posed the same issues as Friday’s.

“It’s basically identical [to Friday], I think,” O’Brien said. “I just really want an accessible, sustainable solution to all this. We all end up buying plastic water bottles when we get put in this position, especially since no one — including those repairing the break — knows how long the issue will last.”

This is not the first time Colgate students have been affected by water main breaks. A major water main on Broad St. broke in February which shut off water for Bryan Complex, 113 Broad Street and the townhouses and caused flooding. A boil water notice was also issued.

Hernon explained that although similarly, the most recent water disruptions were not as severe. The broken pipe in February was older and one of the biggest in the Village, he said, and its break was caused by freezing temperatures combined with strong water pressure.

“I don’t have a cause for this one, but I do think it’s something we see, unfortunately, on the emergency preparedness side of the house cross-country, these systems tend to go,” Hernon said, “so it’s on us to keep looking forward to being prepared to respond to them.”

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Roughly 300 students living on Broad St. between West Kendrick Ave. and College St. lost water access twice last week, first when a water main broke in front of 94 Broad St. on Friday, Sept. 9, and again two days later when a main broke near 66 Broad St. on Sunday, Sept. 11.

Both disruptions were announced by Joe Hernon — associate vice president for emergency management, campus safety, and environmental health and safety — in emails to the Colgate community. The Village of Hamilton initially notified the University of both breaks, and a boil water notice was not issued on either day.

Water service was restored by 6:15 pm on Friday, roughly seven hours after the break was announced. Sunday’s disruption was shorter; service was restored less than two hours later.

Hernon’s emails encouraged affected students to use Case Library, James C. Colgate Hall and the Reid Athletic Center for bathroom facilities, as well as Huntington Gymnasium for showers.

“As you see kind of cross-country, water infrastructure can be outdated, and so it does tend to break,” Hernon said on Friday afternoon. “This is might be one of those unfortunate cases but we don’t have a cause at this time.”

Senior Dassie Spivack, director of facility operations for 84 Broad St. (Delta Delta Delta), said she faced several inconveniences following Friday’s main break. After water that was already in the pipes before access was shut off ran out, residents of the Greek life house only had access to water stored in jugs.

“It was an issue of cleaning things up,” Spivack said. “In the beginning, we kind of forgot about it, so we were using regular plates but we couldn’t wash them, […] so we pretty quickly switched over to single-use paper plates and stuff like that.”

Delta Delta Delta shut down their in-house kitchen because they couldn’t sanitize surfaces. The students also lost access to their bathroom water, forcing them to shower in the apartments and townhouses nearby.

“Luckily it turned back on around 5 pm or 6 pm,” Spivack said, “but when it did turn back on it still wasn’t usable. It was still really brown, so it took another hour or so to even be usable after it turned back on.”

Elsa O’Brien, a sophomore living in the Creative Arts theme house on 100 Broad St., said that Sunday’s water main break posed the same issues as Friday’s.

“It’s basically identical [to Friday], I think,” O’Brien said. “I just really want an accessible, sustainable solution to all this. We all end up buying plastic water bottles when we get put in this position, especially since no one — including those repairing the break — knows how long the issue will last.”

This is not the first time Colgate students have been affected by water main breaks. A major water main on Broad St. broke in February which shut off water for Bryan Complex, 113 Broad Street and the townhouses and caused flooding. A boil water notice was also issued.

Hernon explained that although similarly, the most recent water disruptions were not as severe. The broken pipe in February was older and one of the biggest in the Village, he said, and its break was caused by freezing temperatures combined with strong water pressure.

“I don’t have a cause for this one, but I do think it’s something we see, unfortunately, on the emergency preparedness side of the house cross-country, these systems tend to go,” Hernon said, “so it’s on us to keep looking forward to being prepared to respond to them.”

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San Francisco is arguably America’s most progressive city, so the lopsided recall of three school-board members on Feb. 15 stunned political observers across the country. Voters ousted Alison Collins, Gabriela López and Faauuga Moliga by margins of 59%, 48% and 42%, respectively. Other members were spared because they weren’t on the board long enough to qualify for a recall vote.

It’s not hard for anyone outside of the social-justice-warrior hothouse to understand what happened. Instead of trying to get the city’s schools running after the COVID-19 shutdowns, the city’s school board championed symbolic, far-left political issues that even most San Franciscans — including its liberal political leaders — found distasteful.

“My take is that it was really about the frustration of the Board of Education doing their fundamental job,” said Mayor London Breed. “And that is to make sure that our children are getting educated, that they get back into the classroom. … They were focusing on other things that were clearly a distraction.”

That’s spot on. As the pandemic raged, the board was fixed on renaming 44 San Francisco public schools. It abandoned the effort in April 2021 when the blowback became too much to handle. The effort was absurd, as the board sought to remove names of figures including Abraham Lincoln, naturalist John Muir and Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

To highlight the idiocy, the board tried to change the name of Alamo Elementary School after it “mistakenly assumed that (it) was named for the Texas battle and not for the Spanish word for ‘poplar tree’,” SFist reported. The board also tried to paint over a historical Works Progress Administration mural at George Washington High School — an act that brought comparisons to the Taliban.

More substantively, the board changed a merit-based admissions policy at a top high school and replaced it with a lottery system to promote diversity — something that annoyed the city’s large Asian American community. Most of these battles resulted in litigation — not to mention contentious public meetings centered on the imperfections of 18th century founders.

This ideological insanity obviously diverted attention from basic educational concerns. The city’s schools remained closed. The board and its allied teachers’ union seemed to be in no rush to resume regular schooling, thus allowing the city’s students to fall further behind in their studies. Parents seen with anger, which culminated in the rare recall campaign.

Even political analysts on the mainstream left viewed the vote as a wakeup call for progressives, seeing it as a chance for them to understand that, fundamentally, public schools are about educating students rather than pushing for vast cultural change. But the reactions of the losing parties suggest that they remain in their ideological slumber.

“Don’t be mistaken, white supremacists are enjoying this. And the support of the recall is aligned with this,” López tweeted after her loss. The teachers’ union continued to chide venture capitalists and billionaires, who helped fund the recall campaign. Left-wing commentators saw the vote as the result as part of a conservative political campaign — never mind that Republicans comprise less than 9% of San Francisco’s voter registrations.

The San Francisco recall proves that parents everywhere want their schools to provide quality education — and that elected officials should knock off the fringe nonsense.

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Seven busy corridors in San Francisco are likely to lower their speed limits to 20 mph in early January as the city uses its newfound power to reduce speeds under a new state law.

The announcement of the first speed limit changes the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency is planning under AB43 comes less than a month after Governor Gavin Newsom signed the law. It reflects the urgency of the city to achieve its self-imposed goal of eliminating the death toll of pedestrians by 2024.

Seven corridors would reduce their speed limits according to the proposal that the Agency’s Board of Directors will vote on December 7th:

• Mission Valencia Street from Cesar Chavez to Market Street and sections of 24th Street between Diamond Street and San Bruno Avenue.

• Sections of Haight Street from Stanyan to Steiner Street.

• Polk Street from Filbert to Sutter Street.

• Sections of Fillmore Street between Chestnut and McAllister Streets.

• San Bruno Avenue from Silver to Paul Avenue.

• Segments of Ocean Avenue between Geneva and 19th Avenue.

Pedestrians and vehicles are seen near a 20 mph speed limit sign in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco. The reduced speed limits are part of the city’s goal of avoiding fatal pedestrians.

Nick Otto / Special to The Chronicle

For years, traffic officials and advocates have viewed speed reduction as an effective tool in making city streets more pedestrian-friendly and safer for pedestrians. Research has shown that even reducing speed by 5 mph increases the likelihood of someone surviving a vehicle accident.

But until now, at least, San Francisco and other California cities that wanted to reduce the speed limits on their streets said they were prevented from doing so because of the state’s bureaucratic process of setting speed limits, which historically was based on the average speed of most cars were traveling along a certain corridor.

Most of the city’s road sections have speed limits of 25 mph, and some proponents have called for the city to recognize 20 mph as a de facto speed limit, as San Francisco did on a smaller scale than a 20-quarter speed km / h limits introduced in the tenderloin this spring.

Don’t expect this to happen on AB43. The final version of the bill limited eligible road corridors to those belonging to business districts – including the first seven corridors – or the road network of cities where the greatest number of serious injuries and deaths occur. Cities cannot speed reductions on roads in the latter category until June 2024, and the state Department of Transportation is still in the process of rewriting road eligibility rules.

“We are delighted that the SFMTA is moving so fast to come up with a list of roads that will be speeded down on the AB43,” said Jodie Medeiros, executive director of Walk San Francisco. “Submitting seven corridors for immediate approval is a step in the right direction.”

Several other commercial corridors will be eligible for speed limit reductions under the new law, according to the transport authority. These include Irving, Noriega and Taraval streets at sunset; much of Mission Street; and Clement and Balboa Streets in Richmond.

The city is also looking into reducing speed limits in other neighborhoods such as Fisherman’s Wharf, Chinatown, South of Market, Mission Bay, and the Financial District. Erica Kato, a spokeswoman for the agency, said several streets in these neighborhoods are eligible for speed reductions and the agency’s staff plan to make further recommendations to the board over the next year.

The speed reductions are part of the city’s wider efforts as part of its Vision Zero target to improve safety for pedestrians and cyclists and prevent deaths within the next three years.

Progress has been persistent. Despite restrictions on on-site housing during the pandemic, San Francisco recorded 30 deaths in 2020, up from 29 deaths in 2019.

The San Francisco Transportation Authority is promising a more aggressive approach to road improvement as part of a strategic plan that the board will discuss Tuesday. The agency’s Vision Zero plan calls for the construction of more protected cycle paths, speed limits and measures to calm traffic and reduce lanes.

While the agency has not yet decided on the finer details, many of these changes would come as part of the “quick build process” that the MTA relied on to create a 20-mile network of transit-only lanes during the pandemic. This process aims to reduce bureaucracy that has hindered previous road change efforts by giving the city’s traffic engineer more power to make changes unilaterally.

If the city moves forward on the strategic plan, “we should see and reduce overall serious injuries, collisions and deaths,” Medeiros said. “This is what we asked for.”

Ricardo Cano is a contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: ricardo.cano@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ByRicardoCano

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South San Francisco City Council is considering banning research and development along the El Camino Real corridor within city limits, as well as tightening the language banning certain e-commerce-related distribution centers in the area.

The council discussed the matter during its meeting on Wednesday, during which council members expressed their support for the amendment to the zoning plan.

“We’re seeing an overheated R&D market and some of the ideas we had for potential homes east of 101 were quickly dashed by R&D projects that came quickly and furiously,” said Mayor Mark Addiego. “I think it is very important that the heart of the city, the El Camino Real Corridor, is really for the South San Franciscans, this is really our economic zone.”

R&D work is a key component of the biotech industry, which is still expanding in the region, and the ban would remove compatibility issues as such facilities, which are sometimes “24-hour”, move to low-density residential areas, so a presentation at the city council meeting on Wednesday.

R&D facilities east of Highway 101 have traditionally been successful, and other R&D opportunities exist west of Highway 101 in the Lindenville neighborhood, the presentation said.

A second component of the proposed change would relate to sales establishments that have seen tremendous growth from the rapid rise in online shopping, especially during the pandemic.

“Our current zoning regulation was passed in 2010, it simply did not take into account the use of e-commerce sales as we experience and use it today,” said Tony Rozzi, the city’s chief planner.

The change would update the carrier definition to include a distribution center definition that did not previously exist. It would also introduce the term “parcel hub” which covers users like Amazon and UPS. These uses are likely to continue in mixed industrial areas with a conditional use permit, Rozzi said.

During the meeting, Councilors Eddie Flores and James Coleman raised concerns about a previously received application for an R&D exploitation project at 180 El Camino Real at the southernmost tip of the corridor within the city.

The SteelWave sponsored project would replace the closed Safeway and construct three buildings totaling approximately 750,000 square feet for R&D use.

“My only concern about our home-to-job ratio is if we allow hundreds of more jobs in the area where we already have so many jobs – that would lead to a lot more traffic jams,” said Coleman.

The project, if approved, would be exempted from the ban after a grace period of 180 days, Rozzi said. It’s also outside of the worrying area and close to the San Bruno BART station, he said.

The recommended zoning change will require a second reading at a later date before being adopted.

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