He groans in frustration as he stares at the smoking washing machine. He guesses he won’t be able to wash his clothes tonight.

He turns the machine off and jumps back out of its way as water pours out. The dogs excitedly jump forward to drink out of the pond that was just moments ago an apartment. The man lays out some towels and heads for the phone to call the apartment complex’s emergency maintenance line.

He calls. Despite the fact that residents are under the impression there is supposed to be someone available to answer the phone 24 hours a day, it goes to voicemail. He leaves a message at 6 p.m., then at 8 p.m., then another at 9:30 p.m.

“We’ve got towels all over the floor of my apartment right now,” he says. “It’s so awful.”

Joshua Collins, a sophomore double major in computer science and math, has had numerous issues with his apartment, and many residents at Alpha Alabama Apartments in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, express similar concerns. Some question why a brand new apartment complex, which opened less than a year ago, has so many problems.

Alie Hrabe, vice president of marketing and leasing at Trinitas, the corporate owner of Alpha Alabama Apartments, emailed a statement to Alpha Alabama Apartments, who gave the statement to The Crimson White.

“Our [residents’] safety and satisfaction are our top concerns at each of our properties, including Alpha,” the statement read. “We are aware of the concerns that have been voiced and are diligently working on addressing each issue individually. Some of the concerns that we are working through require multi-step solutions and we are committed to providing the time and resources to fully fix there to not only our [residents’] satisfaction but to ours as well.”

Collins’ air conditioning unit didn’t work for two and a half months near the end of the summer, despite multiple maintenance requests and phone calls. It dripped fluid all over the floor.

“That doesn’t just affect us,” Collins said. “We have two pets that live with us. When we don’t have AC in the hottest summer Alabama’s had and when we have contaminated water all over the floor, that maybe doesn’t as much affect us as we worry because we have dogs.”

To combat this issue, Collins said, he and his roommates bought several box fans, left the door open and used the air from outside and the fans to cool their dogs. According to the Humane Society of the United States’ website, dogs can suffer from heat stroke in extreme temperatures. This was a serious concern for Collins.

“It was like 90 degrees and we didn’t have AC,” he said. “It was ridiculous.”

In addition to these problems, the pipes in Collins’ apartment leaked and his refrigerator would flood.

“I don’t even know how a refrigerator floods, but I guess there was water coming in from the walls,” he said.

Residents don’t have access to the room that has the air conditioning unit and the hot water heater, Collins said, so after repeated calling, he and his roommates broke in. They found that the air conditioning filter looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in months.

His roommate’s bathroom sink, he said, flooded his roommate’s room while he was at work. The furniture breaks constantly and Collins said waiting for maintenance to fix it takes way too long, so they’ve started fixing it themselves.

“The handles on my dresser, whenever my dog would walk by, her tail would hit it and they would fall off, so I just took them off,” he said. “I was like, ‘this is stupid.’ ”

Collins’ roommate, Joshua Cloud, a junior electrical engineering major, agreed that there were serious problems with the complex.

Collins did say, however, that the maintenance team isn’t the problem, it’s the management. He said maintenance has recently gone above and beyond to attempt to fix their issues.

Collins and Cloud aren’t the only residents having problems. Mallory Ivy, a sophomore microbiology major, said her refrigerator hasn’t worked since day one. The freezer doesn’t close all the way and it causes all the food inside to thaw. Maintenance tried to fix it four times to no avail.

“It still doesn’t work,” Ivy said. “They have it propped up so it’s angled backwards to keep everything in and colder.”

Ivy’s shower head was broken when she first moved in and they fixed it with tape. In addition, her window had a large crack going all the way through the pane. Ivy was the first person to live in this room, and she found the fact that so many things were already broken very strange. Ivy sent The Crimson White pictures of the cracked window and the broken shower head.

When it rains heavily, Ivy’s first-floor apartment floods. Some water comes in through the floor and some comes in through the windows, she said. When she steps on the flooded floor, she said, water came up out of the carpets. Ivy sent The Crimson White pictures of this flooding and email conversations with apartment complex workers about maintenance requests. They’ve now flooded four times, once before Christmas break, twice during and once after. One roommate stayed over the break and came home to quite the surprise after a flooding, Ivy said.

“They went through all of our units and didn’t tell us that they had been in the units,” Ivy said. “They tore up my roommate’s carpets without telling us and threw one of my roommate’s stuff out of the room without telling her. She came home to all her things out in the living room. It is an ordeal that is still being worked on.”

She said maintenance workers take a long time to respond to a request and when they do, they don’t seem competent.

She said a brand new building shouldn’t be experiencing these types of problems.

“I think it’s their fault,” Ivy said. “They gave themselves a year to build this apartment and they thought it was so cool but it’s stupid.”

Taylor Sheeran agreed that this was a problem. She said there were leaks in the pipes in her bathroom wall and weird discoloration in the ceiling above the shower. It looked like mold, she said, but it wasn’t. She sent in a maintenance request and they came within a week or two.

“They ended up having to cut a hole out of my ceiling to fix the leak,” Sheeran said. “I could still use my bathroom shower, there was just a hole in my ceiling.”

It took two or three weeks for maintenance to come back and fill the hole. During that time, Sheeran noticed bugs crawling around her bathroom, which she assumed came from the hole.

“It’s kind of weird that that would happen in a new building,” Sheeran said.

However, Sheeran said that other than this incident, she’s very pleased with the complex.

Mikaela Dutton, a sophomore majoring in nursing, said her problems with the complex started around Labor Day, when she was locked out of her bedroom. Dutton sent The Crimson White emailed conversations with apartment management about her problems. She and her roommates took turns calling the complex’s emergency maintenance number. Each time they called, they got a message saying the number was disabled. Dutton met with two managers about this, who told her she was dialing the wrong number.

“I had to pay a locksmith to get me into my room,” Dutton said.

Dutton’s father requested that they be reimbursed for the money spent on the locksmith. They never received anything back, Dutton said.

After a football game in October, the people living above Dutton had a huge party.

“They started jumping up and down all at the same time at three in the morning and our ceiling started to collapse, and so we woke up and our fan had completely fallen, the smoke detectors, the lights, the ceiling started caving,” Dutton said.

Dutton and her roommates ran upstairs to talk to the residents of the room and they immediately shut down the party. Her apartment wasn’t fixed until January, Dutton said.

While they couldn’t live in their apartment, the complex moved them into two two-bedroom apartments. They left some of their stuff in their original apartment. Dutton said managers told them they would still have access to it, and that before any serious work was done, they’d let them know they needed to move their stuff out if they wanted to be able to use it.

“They couldn’t tell us when things were going to be done, then all [of] the sudden we walked in and the entire ceiling had been taken out,” Dutton said. “There were metal beams striking straight down, insulation everywhere, wires, drills and knives, you couldn’t walk in there. The nails were on the floor. It was completely dangerous. I’d never seen anything like it.”

Since the manager wasn’t answering her dad’s questions over the phone, he and her uncle flew down from Chicago and met with him. The manager apologized repeatedly, saying he didn’t want this to affect Dutton’s resigning, Dutton said.

The big question, Dutton said, was with utilities. She said they told her she wouldn’t have to pay utilities as long as construction workers were in there.

“Now that we’ve moved back in, we’re asking if we need to be paying utilities or can we be compensated?” she said. “It was a big ordeal and the managers were less than helpful, more so getting frustrated and mad to the point where they would not answer our calls or emails.”

Tim Dutton, her father, said that he flew down on Nov. 19 and met with the manager on Nov. 21 about the problems.

“It was a little bit frustrating for me as a parent that they didn’t do it like they should have,” he said.

He did say, however, that he was glad they gave his daughter and her roommates a place to stay and offered help moving if needed. They just didn’t realize, he said, how bad the damage was.

Hatti Blackburn, leasing associate at Alpha, said she hadn’t really heard of several off the issues brought up by this story. She said often, they get calls from parents before they get maintenance requests, so they don’t even know there are problems.

“We just wish they would communicate with us,” Blackburn said. “Us. Not Twitter or social media and let us know what’s going on so we can put someone on it because that’s what we’re here for.”

Caroline Vincent, a junior majoring in journalism and assistant news editor for The Crimson White, said she arrived home from spring break at 4 a.m. to find her bedroom door locked with her key inside. She slept in her roommate’s bed and went to the front desk later that day to ask to be let in, since she had left her room unlocked and, therefore, someone had locked her room.

The woman at the front desk told her that they had done inspections over break, and when they do inspections, they try to leave the rooms the way they found them. Vincent, however, remembered leaving her door unlocked.

“I couldn’t have locked it if I didn’t have the key,” she said.

Vincent asked if someone could come unlock her door for her. She said the woman looked annoyed, like she had heard the request several times already.

“She was like, ‘yeah, just pick it with a credit card or a butter knife,’ ” Vincent said. “When I went down for help, I was expecting them to come up with me and have a master key and let me in, but no, she just told me to pick my door.”

She, her roommate and her friends tried to pick the lock. One of her friends slid his credit card between the wall and the door and the door opened.

“It was our first day back,” she said. “I just wanted to be in my room. I don’t know what I would’ve done if we hadn’t been able to get in.”

Collins said he just wants to receive the services he’s paying for.

“We’re not trying to annoy you, we’re not trying to bug you constantly, we’re not trying to do anything,” Collins said. “We just have problems that aren’t getting fixed and they need to be fixed.”