A pipe break earlier this afternoon left all floors in Van Munching Hall flooded with water, creating large puddles, sunken ceilings and damaging a classroom and some bathrooms. 

Before 3 p.m., cold air and snow leaked into the business school’s mechanical room, causing the sprinkler pipe to freeze, expand and break, said Julius Williams, a spokesman for hazardous materials and recovery services with Facilities Management. 

Facilities Management officials responded to the building by 3 p.m. and patched up the broken pipe.

Van Munching

Junior finance major Ryan Vogt said he was studying in a first-floor classroom filled with computers at about 2:30 p.m. when the fire alarms went off. As he exited the classroom, he saw water pouring out of the roof’s top vents and into the atrium. 

“It was coming down like a very, very slight waterfall,” he said. 

While the pipe stopped leaking, puddles, collapsed ceiling tiles and damp carpet areas were scattered throughout the building’s western hallways and offices. Facilities Management service workers arrived at Van Munching Hall last night at about 6 p.m. to begin vacuuming the water and assessing the damage.

“The water is going to go where it’s going to go; we just have to fix the pipe and start cleaning it up,” Williams said.

Facilities Management officials still need to assess the mechanical and electrical damage in the building, as well as the costs of the damages, he said.

Ensuring the classrooms are still functional for today’s classes was the foremost goal, said Lee Comstock, the business school’s director of operations. So far, officials noted that the pipe only caused damage to the bathrooms near the building’s rear entrance elevators and the classroom in room 1303, he said. However, there is little water on the carpet, and workers should be able to fix it by early this morning, he said.

Van Munching break

Puddles of water about an inch deep filled parts of the hallway near the building’s rear entrance and staircase on the first floor. In the men’s bathroom on the first floor, about a fourth of the ceiling fell down and covered the toilets and floor with debris on one side, while water piled up on the opposite side. In the women’s bathroom, water leaked out of the sprinkler system. 

The elevators also stopped working because water was leaking inside of them. 

Water filled the offices closest to the elevator on the fourth floor, leaving more puddles and a ruined carpet. At least one room had a broken ceiling tile, and chunks of some rooms’ ceilings fell to the floor.

“At this point, we just got to try to save as many finishes as we can and then start the recovery process,” Williams said. “We save what we can, get the water up, and we start estimating and evaluating the damage.”