a clean sweep KEEPING Clean By: Phillip Lawless, Editor McWane Science Center How environmental services keeps this unique facility safe for visitors, staff and aquatic animals. 4,000 to 6,000 school group visitors. Weekend visitor counts in spring often depend on the weather. The number of visitors decreases during the summer, but the facility hosts sum-mer camps for campers in K5 through the eighth grade. When fall weather arrives in late Septem-ber and October, attendance picks up again. For the winter holidays, McWane hosts a number of events and company parties, and the week between Christmas and New Years is especially busy with Birmingham families visiting the museum while school is out and offices are closed. Open aquarium tanks require cleaning staff to be cautious with the cleaning sup-plies used around the habitats. O Over the past year, the redevelopment of Birmingham, Alabama’s, downtown area has generated positive press for the city. As new parks, restaurants, breweries and venues have opened, magazines and news websites have reported on the resurgent city and its updated points of interest. One of the earliest attractions to find its home in downtown Birmingham was Mc-Wane Science Center. The nonprofit museum opened in 1998, and it was built inside a refurbished build-ing that housed a Loveman’s department store. A Full Tour Phillip Moore, Director of Facilities for Mc-Wane Science Center, explains that the mu-seum has four floors and each is home to a different type of exhibit or use. The museum’s lowest level includes an aquarium, school lunchrooms and a vend-ing area. Next, the first floor is composed of the grand lobby, the IMAX Dome Theater en-trance, a small food court style café, the Ad-venture Halls section with multiple exhibits and the museum’s store, Really Cool Stuff. Currently, half of the second floor is home to an Alabama dinosaur’s exhibit. Within the other half, construction of the new children’s museum is underway. Finally, traveling exhibits are set up on the third floor, and this level includes art and tech areas as well as an event center. The museum’s environmental services team, led by Environmental Services Man-ager Brian Ruffin, is responsible for the Why Cleaning Is So Important “I tell all of Brian’s people, they are the first line of defense when it comes to McWane Science Center,” Moore explains. “When people get off the parking deck elevator, they look at the lobby. Is the lobby clean? The next area is going to be the restrooms.” Due to their location, one of the first places visitors go upon arrival is the lobby restroom. “They don’t want to bring their families here or children here and go into a restroom that’s just not presentable and has an un-healthy appearance,” Moore states. “So we really, really stay focused on cleaning the restrooms.” Ruffin says daily maintenance on the lob-by restrooms is often more of a challenge because the restrooms are accessible to the general public as well as paid museum visitors. www.CMMOnline.com cleaning of all the private and public areas in the science center. This means the environmental services team regularly performs an array of clean-ing activity from cleaning up after special events and IMAX showings to vacuuming out the store and maintaining food court floors and trash cans. For All Seasons McWane Science Center’s — and the envi-ronmental service team’s — busiest time of the year is definitely spring due to frequent field trips and visiting school groups. Moore estimates that McWane hosts any-where from 5,000 to 7,000 visitors a week, Monday through Friday; this total includes 47
CMM – Archives August 2014: 47
