47,100 Students 660 Acres University of Houston Houston, Texas 15 Hours of Classes Each Day (7 a.m. through 10 p.m.) 156 Buildings 6,000 Staff CHANGE COMES TO CAMPUS Rufus Kemp and Jeff Benjamin are on a digital call talking about paper towel dispensers. Again. If you know them, this isn’t an odd topic of conversation. Both men work for the University of Houston, and during the height of the pandemic, they needed to find a way to switch every dispenser on campus to a safer, touchless model. This is going to be a huge project. But where to begin? Before the pandemic, a normal day for the university would see 48,000 students and 6,000 researchers, faculty, and staff on the campus. Even as COVID was ramping up across the U.S., a lot of people were still coming to campus. As a Tier One Carnegie Research University, the campus wasn’t going to shut down experiments; the work needed to continue. Kemp and Benjamin both knew this. So, their priority became finding ways to boost public safety while maintaining some normalcy. “A number of our facilities still had turn-style faucets and manually operated paper towel dispensers,” said Benjamin, the Assistant Vice President of Facilities Services. “It was very apparent that this would be a quick hit in order to really reduce exposure points.” Located in the third-largest metro in America, the University of Houston has a lot of people coming through the campus. Many buildings were built before touchless technology was commonplace. To reach out to a Government Account Sales Specialist, please email govsales@fastenal.com.
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