On Feb. 19 students were evacuated to the Student Union due to minor flooding on the bottom floor of the Student Living Center dorms. A burst pipe caused the flooding. 

“I was in my room asleep, and then the fire alarm went off, me, my roommate were kind of just asking what was going on… the RA came… saying that we needed to go downstairs,” said Clarissa DeLaFuente, a physical education major. “When we came downstairs, there were lots of people down here in the lobby, and we didn’t know what to do…but then we heard water just falling all over the floor.”

Some students even saw the flooding first-hand. Diogo Borges, a pre-engineering major said, “I was sleeping, and then I heard the alarm, and then I looked to my right and it’s like a lot of water. We all run to the lobby, then they ask us to go to the union [Student Union] and then when we come back, all the rooms and the hall were flooded too.”

The flooding affected many rooms, including Sacha Paley’s, a business administration major and roommate to Borges.

“The bathroom was all flooded… there were some rooms that were really worse than mine,” said Payley. 

The flooding’s impact varied depending on whether students lived on the first or second floor, with the first floor experiencing the most severe damage as water flowed down the stairs from the burst pipe on the second floor.

“No, I live on the second floor, but some of my teammates’ rooms, their rooms, the bottom of their floor was just all covered with water,” said DeLaFuente. “Their carpet was all wet, like all this stuff on the floor that they had was just all wet… Their floors were crooked, so I know there was more water on one side than the other.”

After the chaos settled, some students had quite the story to tell. 

 “I was hoping that I’d be able to just go straight back to bed, but someone was knocking on the door, screaming,” said Kyle Kerr-Miller, a general studies major. “…There’s water coming in the room… and there is literally a load of water coming under the door, and the water had stuff in it… and it smelled funny. So at first I was like, ‘Oh shit, there’s literally sewage water coming into the room.’ I was like, ‘Fuck, this is really not good’… I got up, I’ve got every single towel that I owned, and I tried to block it off, from where the sink was.”

At the end, students cleaned up the water. The burst section of the piping has been fixed, though the ceiling still needs maintenance.