A broken water main gushes water just outside of the Shoemaker Building on Wednesday morning.
Three university water mains broke during a nine-hour span Monday, resulting in water outages for several buildings on the campus and leaving hundreds of students without running water in their residences.
According to Facilities Operations and Maintenance Director Jack Baker, two of the breaks occurred outside Taliaferro Hall and the third happened outside the newly renovated Shoemaker Hall.
Baker said the two breaks outside Taliaferro probably occurred sometime in the early afternoon, while the break near Shoemaker happened at about 9 p.m.
Baker said the cause of the breaks was the recent stretch of cold weather that has descended on College Park.
“When the ground freezes repeatedly, it shifts, and that causes pipes to burst,” he said.
All three breaks occurred on the same pipeline — from Morrill Hall to Route 1 — and Baker said replacement of this particular line will begin over the summer due to its age and the growing number of recent pipe bursts.
Student complaints of lack of water pressure in Worcester and Somerset Halls at about 3 p.m. Monday alerted Facilities Management to the problem, and the breaks were discovered shortly thereafter.
Baker said the water pipes underground run in a loop-like fashion in which water is distributed to a string of buildings that branch off from a larger pipe, so in order to fix a break, water has to be shut off in the entire loop.
“In order to try and fix a break, you have to isolate it,” Baker said.
About 12 buildings were affected in all, though the problems were limited to parts of the North Hill and South Hill communities. A variety of effects were reported during the incident, including lack of water pressure, no hot or cold water, brown water and no water altogether.
Some residents faced water problems for most of Monday afternoon, but maintenance crews who responded to the break at Shoemaker decided against shutting off the water at a time when most students would be at home, opting instead to deal with it in the morning when not as many people would be in their dorms.
Some students walking past Shoemaker Hall on Tuesday night stopped to take pictures and videos on their phones, noting the bizarre sight of water gushing out of the ground and onto the sidewalk. Among them was sophomore electrical engineering major Jason Arora, a resident of nearby Talbot Hall.
“We went a good portion of the day with no water for the toilet,” he said. “It was brown when it came back.”
An e-mail was sent early Tuesday morning to Calvert, Garret, Talbot, Kent and Cecil Halls alerting residents to a 10 a.m. water outage in order to fix the break at Shoemaker. Pipes were repaired and water restored to the buildings by the afternoon.
But some were less than thrilled by the timing of the e-mail alert. Jonathan Katz, a sophomore marketing major who lives in Calvert Hall, said one of his suite mates used the toilet in the morning without knowing the water had been shut off.
“It would have made a lot more sense [if the e-mail had been sent last night] because everybody would have been prepared, at least,” he said.
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