Students on Uilenstede are frequently left without water
Students on Uilenstede are very frequently left without running water. According to campus residents, it happens almost every month. “We recently had no water from Friday through to Monday morning.”
Showering, cooking, doing the dishes or simply flushing the toilet; being able to meet these basic household needs has not been a given for residents of the student campus Uilenstede in Amstelveen for quite some time. The student housing is very frequently without running water.
The problem affects several buildings on campus, but the disruption is by far the greatest for residents of “the dark blue tower block,” as confirmed by multiple students. One of them is 23-year-old Earth sciences student Meike Biemans. “It happened again last week,” she says as she steps out of the lift with two friends. “Over the past six months, I think we’ve had no water about ten times.” In the best-case scenario, the outage lasts a few hours, but there have also been occasions when the water was gone for days. “We recently had no water from Friday through to Monday morning, that was the worst instance.”
In such cases, Biemans and her housemates shower at the campus sports centre, where they also fill large buckets with water. “But of course that’s not ideal,” she says. Biemans describes communication with the housing provider Duwo as inadequate. “We hear from engineers that certain pipes really need to be repaired, but that isn’t confirmed to us by Duwo.”
Fifteen times
A few floors up lives 24-year-old history student Joep Olie. When asked about the scale of the problem, he pulls out his phone and shows a document in which he and fellow residents keep track of how often the tower block is without water. In just over a year – the list begins in February 2025 – fifteen entries have already been recorded. The most recent notes date from 10 April, 7 April, and 6 to 9 March.
“Recently, I came home late in the evening, completely sweaty after exercising, only to find there was no water again. That’s really unpleasant,” says Olie. “In those cases, we take water home so we can wash using a flannel. I’ve also showered at the sports centre downstairs, and I often spend a night at my parents’ place in The Hague when there’s no water again. When the water was gone for four days recently, we received compensation of thirteen euros from Duwo.”
Jarno Dommering, a 24-year-old business administration student, also says he has frequently had to carry buckets of water back and forth over the past year. “Whenever there’s no water again, we fill the kitchen with basins, bottles and pans of water. Otherwise, even simple things like washing your hands or doing the dishes become impossible. Recently, the entire kitchen was piled high with dirty dishes. At first it was incredibly frustrating, but nowadays we’re no longer surprised and just think: here we go again.”
Compensation
In a response, Duwo says it is aware of the issues at Uilenstede and that a major replacement operation is imminent. “We expect to be able to start the replacement works before the summer and to resolve the issues for all tower blocks before the end of the year,” a spokesperson said. “In addition, residents are entitled to financial compensation in cases of prolonged disruption. We do our best to grant this as quickly as possible.”
