A hot water pipe caused water damage in rooms on the upper floors of Randolph residence hall early Friday afternoon, forcing some residents to temporarily live elsewhere.
The water—which leaked from a pipe on the mechanical fourth floor of the dormitory—caused damage in seven rooms, according to Lisa Beth Bergene, associate dean of East Campus for Housing, Dining and Residence Life. Bergene noted that at this point in time it is unclear what caused the leak.
“A restoration team is working this evening and this weekend to extract water from the carpets and to ensure that the rooms are dried out,” Bergene wrote in an email Friday. “Once that happens, the students in those rooms will be allowed to re-occupy the spaces.”
Freshman Ryan Ferner was one of the students who was relocated after the flooding—he does not expect to return to his room until Wednesday.
“AfterDisaster currently has all sorts of heavy machinery in my and several other folks' rooms,” he wrote in an email. “They punched a hole in the sheetrock of the ceiling and are running some pumps and dehumidifiers in an attempt to evacuate as much moisture as they can.”
Ferner was also one of the first people to notice the leak, which caused substantial damage in the dorm.
“I found that water was dripping from the the hole occupied by my smoke detector,” he wrote. “After positioning a couple bins underneath and relocating all of my and my dear roommate's paper products, I entered the hall to find others similarly blighted. While my spill was flowing at a rate of perhaps a gallon per 20 minutes, some poor souls had their entire drop-down ceiling demolished by the water flow.”
Ferner also noted that most of the damage seemed to be in the center of the building on the third floor.
“The water seeped somewhat through the floor and mildly affected the center of the second floor,” Ferner wrote.
Freshman Srinath Soundararajan explained that he saw water leaking into one of the common rooms in the dorm.
“I went down to the common room around 12:45 [p.m.]… when I got there, I saw that water was leaking from the ceiling in two places," he wrote. "It was dripping onto a couch on one end of the room, and was dripping on the floor at the other end (though it was just making the carpet wet—there was no flooding)."
Bergene wrote that the water was clean water, and not grey water.
“The discharge was of a somewhat brownish hue, but was assuredly not waste by the smell,” Ferner noted.
This story was updated Sunday to include Ferner's update that he does not expect to return to his room until Wednesday.
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