There was a flood Wednesday in Cramer Hall after a furnace pipe allegedly malfunctioned and caused a water leak.
The flood occurred on the sixth floor of the building after one of the residents heard the pipe on the bottom of their furnace burst. The burst resulted in the room beginning to fill with water. The flooding occurred in rooms next to the one where the pipe flooded, as well as the rooms directly below it for two floors.
Business administration junior Cole Caspers was roommates with the person whose room had the pipe explode. He returned home after getting a call from his roommate.
“I’m running up here and I’m like, expecting like a little bit of water,” Caspers said. “No, it was from every part of his room was an inch of water and then like half of my room was an inch of water. I had to take my socks and shoes off and walk in my flip flops because it was so like deep of water.”
Caspers explained that he was told that there was damage to some of the stuff in the room which ranged from furniture having water marks, to his roommates speaker becoming unusable.
Digital and animation game design and business administration senior Mandy Yaxley shared a wall with the room where the flooding occurred.
“I was working on homework and then I glanced over and it was all my stuff was just wet,” Yaxley said. “I’m like, ‘Where’s this water coming from?’ I grabbed out the thing that I thought maybe it was caught in the water. And it wasn’t and then I realized where the water was coming from. It was coming from under the wall.”
Yaxley explained that she had to throw out some of her things in her room, including her paper plates, as they had significant water damage.
Caspers explained that the flooding that occurred in the room was from the water reservoir from floors six through eleven. He also stated that there was a black substance floating within the water caused by the furnace system.
“They had someone come up here and like they stopped it from flooding like within 40 minutes,” Caspers said. “So that was super awesome that they came in that night. I was thinking it was just going to keep going, but then they came and stopped it. Then they had a person, kind of the whole janitor staff, come in and then they cleaned up the whole mess in like 30 minutes.”
Caspers explained that the maintenance teams had to reseal the furnace in his roommate’s room before having to bleed the air out of the system. The system needed to have the air bled out before it could be refilled with water. He also explained that the staff checked in on how he and his roommate were afterwords and also that he was advised to talk to housing about damages that occurred.