By Elizabeth Dudek and Jennifer Nelson
As Patrick Graham lay sleeping in his West Village G apartment, he was unaware of the water seeping in and surrounding him. When the fire alarm sounded around 11:30 a.m., he woke up to a layer of fog hovering through his room. He stepped down from his bed into a puddle of water.
“The whole kitchen, hallway, living room and my room were flooded. I started unplugging all my stuff, everything was wet,” the junior sociology major said.
Graham’s roommate had left the window open in his bedroom the night before. With yesterday’s frigid temperatures, the combination of the cold and the open window was too much for the water pipes to take. The pipes burst, flooding Graham’s apartment, the apartment below and the card-swiping desk in the lobby.
“First, it just started trickling through the ceiling,” said Eric Swenson, the Security Representative swiping cards at the time. That was at 11:05 a.m. By 11:30 a.m., “it was pouring out of the light fixtures and everything.”
Swenson said it took about 15 minutes for maintenance to arrive. They pulled the fire alarm, evacuating the building.
“We had to go into the lobby on the classroom side of the building,” said Luis Sanchez, a senior psychology major. “We had to sit in there for about 15 minutes. The front door froze shut so they put the police barrier around it.”
Maintenance crews used vacuums and heaters to try and clean up the leaked water. The mess in the apartments, however, went beyond just soaking walls and carpeting.
“My modems, monitor, printer and iPod were all damaged. The only thing I still have is my phone charger and my Playstation,” Graham said. “I just got the computer for Christmas. I must have had around $1,500 worth of damage.”
The flood also caused the card-swiping computers in the lobby to short-circuit, Swenson said.
Residents of the building were allowed to return to their rooms, but the residents of the two rooms with the greatest damage are being moved to other residence halls until the damage is fixed.
“I’m going to come back here,” said Graham’s roommate, Adam Rocha, a junior mechanical engineering major. “It’s a really nice room, without all the water.”
