Rains cause flooding on campus

Heavy rains flooded areas of the Arts & Sciences building, Porter Hall and the Maxwell Student Union causing damage in all three places.

On March 20, at 3:44 a.m. two public safety officers were dispatched to room 132 of Arts & Sciences. There, Officer Wanda Yates and Officer Williams found Dale Boyer, a night custodian, and his equipment ready for clean up. Rain water had bubbled up from a piece of conduit in the floor.

“The water was pouring in from the side wall,” said Boyer. “It came through an outside pipe that enters the room.”

Room 132 of Arts & Sciences is an equipment room located on the first floor. It mainly contains a system of telephone wires, but also has pipes running up through the floor.

“It appeared to me to be about fifteen gallons of water that leaked in,” said Boyer.

The public safety department never found out the final damage report and stated that there was no known damage at the time of the incident.

“This is just a speculation, but water may have been leaking through the pipe entries in the ground, given the status of room 132 in Arts & Sciences,” said Richard Goodson, from the department of public safety.

Porter Hall also suffered water damage on the same night.

“We didn’t have any flooding, but we did have trouble with the phone lines,” said Lori Watson, an office assistant at Porter Hall.

The phone lines were restored to good working order. They did; however, cause some problems in the office for the remainder of the day.

“The phone lines were so full of static you could hear it across the room,” said Watson. “But fortunately, that didn’t mean we couldn’t use the phones.”

The Colonnade office suffered $1,200 worth of computer damage, due to a water leak on March 3. The Student Government Association office also had computer damage due to the same storm.

With all of the construction on campus it is difficult to keep GC&SU leak free.

“We spend a lot of time and money in an effort to stay ahead and keep an eye on things,” said Rick Ruark, associate director of plant operations. “We are doing all that we can for the prevention of leaks and if incidents are not reported we have no reason to believe there are problems.”

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Apr 4 2003. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry