It May Cost All West Virginia Students Money if The Football Team Keeps Winning (and fans celebrating)

Anyone associated with West Virginia University has to be proud to have that relationship right about now. Students, faculty, alumni, admin workers, etc. are all probably on Cloud Nine after a dominate win over the Baylor Bears Saturday. However, at the same time it's kind of a bummer.

So much damage was done in the post-game celebration riots the school is tossing around all sort of ideas on how to handle future celebrations--and student are not going to like any of them.

@SBNationGIF/Twitter

The amount of damage that has been reported because fans were happy the football team won a big game is kind of crazy:

• The fire department was called out for 32 street fires and seven dumpster fires
• According to the Monongalia County Homeland Security Emergency Management Agency there were 114 emergency 911 calls as well as 135 non-emergency calls and 126 incidents requiring Public Safety Responses.
• Three Morgantown Police Department Cruisers, two Morgantown Fire Marshal vehicles and one fire engine, along with three West Virginia University patrol cars, one Monongalia County Patrol Car and one Westover Police Department Patrol Car were damaged by rocks, beer bottles and construction debris during the riot, according to Morgantown Police.
• at least two street lamps were pushed over
• a number of street signs were stolen

One of the ideas being batted around on how to deal with similar situations in the future involves students being charged a fee to cover the cost of expanding the fire and police departments so that they could better respond to situations.

There is also talk of forming a Joint Operations center for the school, local police, university police, state police, Homeland Security, and the West Virginia Department of Military Affairs and Public Safety. The city is also trying to gather support to make starting dumpster fires a felony.

Coach burning was made a felony punishable with up to three years in prison a couple of years ago, but does seem to have made much of an impact.

[WBOY]

Loading...