Just two weeks before being flooded with students, Paul and Barbara Gentile (PBG) Hall experienced a much-less-welcome deluge when a first-floor pipe burst overnight.
Sometime during the evening of Aug. 13, a connection valve detached from the pipe above PBG’s first floor janitorial room, Keith Cocking, senior director of construction services, said. Because of the pipe’s central location, water flooded the welcome lobby, the hall director’s apartment, the Spencer Center for Global Engagement and the portion of the first floor still under construction.
Though he didn’t know the exact amount, Cocking estimated that the pipe dumped tens of thousands of gallons of water into the dorm. At 3 inches in diameter, the pipe was very large and significantly pressurized, he added.
“I think that pipe puts out between 150 and 200 gallons a minute,” Cocking said. “It was a lot of water.”
When an individual discovered the flood at 5 a.m. the next morning, the water was immediately shut off, allowing workers to begin surveying the damage.
All of the recently-laid flooring in the welcome lobby and the hall director’s apartment, as well as some of the flooring in the Spencer Center, had to be torn out, Cocking said. The bottom portion of the cabinets in those spaces also required replacement, which meant removing the countertops, plumbing and cabinets to complete repairs.
However, thanks to immediate action by the contractors involved, restoration was soon underway, Cocking said.
“Within six hours, all of the flooring was removed,” Cocking said. “A remediation company was called and was able to be on site, which was pretty miraculous, given the flooding all around the state…and so they were able to vacuum up all the water, remove all the damage, debris, remove all flooring, and install a large number of commercial dehumidifiers on fans, whose purpose was to pull the water out of the concrete slab.”
One of the most-essential portions of restoration was drying out the concrete. Concrete absorbs water, Cocking explained, and flooring cannot be laid when the slab underneath it is wet.
To ensure optimal water removal, workers let the concrete dry for a few days, completing multiple moisture tests throughout the process.
“It has to hit a certain point before we’re able to start reinstalling anything,” Cocking said. “So, it just has to sit there and dry as aggressively as it can for as long as it can.”
One of the biggest worries was the building’s elevator. The flooding filled the elevator pit — which extends below the first floor — with water. Because the extent of the damage was unknown, crews disabled the elevator until a representative from the elevator manufacturer completed a safety inspection.
After eight hours of examination, the representative concluded that, while some parts needed to be replaced for warranty reasons, the elevator was operating correctly and “safe to use.”
“So the elevator is running right now even though there are specific parts that they will replace at some point in the future,” Cocking said. “There’s no concerns about the use of the elevator. It’s more of a warranty thing for them to make sure there’s brand new parts in there.”
By Aug. 21, crews had completed most of the repairs, he said, with reinstallation wrapping up the Tuesday before Welcome Weekend.
He estimated that the project only fell behind by four to five working days, which he described as “pretty miraculous” in light of the damage that occurred. The drywall, cabinetry, baseboards and flooring were removed and replaced in just over a week.
As the plumbing company’s insurance will cover repairs, the incident will not affect Taylor financially, Cocking said.
“I want to be very careful in not implying that this was negligence or anything like that,” Cocking said. “But in either case, that’s why contractors carry insurance. Whether it was someone’s fault or not, it is their responsibility.”
Though the cause of the incident is unknown, possible explanations include a faulty valve, degradation in that area of the plumbing or some other change. However, water had been turned on in the building for two weeks prior, and the exact pipe had been under inspection twice, making the event “a really unexpected thing,” Cocking explained.
Despite the uncertainty surrounding the cause, crews replaced all other valves of the same make in PBG Hall as a precautionary measure.
Commenting on the remarkably quick turnaround, Cocking expressed gratitude for the contractors who immediately jumped into action to fix the situation.
“It really is a miracle that they were able to, in literally one week, remove pretty much everything from the entire first floor and put it all back,” he said. “And that kept us on track for moving students in before Welcome Weekend.”
“In construction, stuff does happen sometimes,” he continued. “We obviously don’t ever want it to happen right before students are moving into a building for the first time, but it did, and somehow our partners were able to really step up and turn things around in an incredibly fast amount of time.”
