BROOKINGS – While students were away on winter break, staff and cleaning crews were hard at work cleaning up office space at the South Dakota State University Student Union after a frozen pipe flooded office space on the last day of 2017.
And even though there were 16 rooms with some form of water damage, Student Union officials were happy to say that there has been no interruption of services, even though staff and services have relocated elsewhere throughout the building. It’s hoped that they’ll be able to move back into their offices within a month.
Classes began again at SDSU on Monday.
They’re still working to determine the cause of the burst pipe.
“We know that certainly something froze; we don’t know exactly why,” Jennifer Novotny, senior director for the Student Union, said.
The break happened near a fire sprinkler head in Office Suite 150, which contains three departments – Student Union administration, Event Services and catering – and the Student Union Information Desk.
Costs of cleanup and repair could run between $35,000 and $50,000, depending on what can be saved and what needs to be replaced, Novotny said.
The response was thankfully quick. Since it was a fire sprinkler line that cracked, it triggered the fire alarm system, alerting by text message multiple university staff, including a University Police officer and Keith Skogstad, who were the first ones on scene.
Skogstad works as the Student Union’s liaison with SDSU’s Facilities and Services. The alarm went off when he was eating breakfast at about 10 a.m. Dec. 31. It took him about 10 minutes to get from home to the Student Union to start searching for the source of the alarm.
When he opened the door of the office suite, water was seeping in from under the next door.
“I went downstairs, shut the water off, came back up here, saw all the water coming out of (Event Services Assistant Director Mark Venhuizen’s) office and went to try to open it. But there was too much force, so I had to wait for (the water level) to drop down,” he said.
His next step was then to begin mobilizing help to clean things up by making all the necessary phone calls, including to Intek Cleaning & Restoration and Nu-Tech Environmental Control to assist.
Furniture from the offices were rushed out to the Union’s Main Street, where they remained while fans dried out the rooms.
In the office suite, there are a total of 16 rooms, all with some form of damage – damaged carpet at the very least, potential water damage to the walls in others.
But Venhuizen’s office took the worst of it, as the burst happened at the fire sprinkler in his office.
Just a few inches away from the sprinkler head is where the 3/4-inch pipe cracked, allowing the pressurized water to surge into the office. The force was enough to tear away some of nearby insulation in the ceiling.
They had to take out the lower parts of three of Venhuizen’s walls, which were drywalls. The insulation had absorbed a lot of the water, drawing it up and into the walls. So even though the water level in the office was only about 12 inches, the walls were removed up to about the 4-foot mark so the insulation could be taken out. They were completely sodden.
Water streamed into the office just south of his through the ceiling, damaging the artwork hanging there, while the room to the north of his office wasn’t nearly as bad thanks to the brick wall that continued up above the drop-tile ceiling.
Pointing to two framed pieces of art – an original tile from Pugsley Union with a depiction of the building and a parchment image of a jackrabbit – Novotny said, “The good news is that these two made it. The bad news is we have 12 other pieces that didn’t look so good,” but work is being done to salvage and restore what they can.
Also among the damaged items are old documents such as newspaper clippings that contained information on events that happened at the Student Union, which was built in 1973, and electronics such as five computer monitors, two printers and outlet surge protectors.
The doors of each individual office were thankfully shut, as they always are for security reasons, meaning that the water levels went incrementally down with each room.
But there was still a lot of water to deal with – as much as 12 inches in Venhuizen’s office, and the water reached as far as the carpet near the fireplace in the common area in the Student Union and the laminated floorboards of the neighboring Bookstore.
While they were able to dry out and clean the carpet in that small section of the Student Union lounging area, something will have to be done about the University Bookstore floor. Those floorboards only have slight ripples and don’t present a safety hazard, meaning it can replaced at a later time, when students aren’t present.
It’s still being determined if the carpet in the office suite can be salvaged.
“If that doesn’t happen, what we’ll still do is thoroughly clean it,” Novotny said Friday. What course of action they take with the carpet will be the main determining factor in how long it will take the various departments to move back into the office suite. “It could be as little as next week, it could be as long as (four) weeks.”
Contact Eric Sandbulte at esandbulte@brookingsregister.com.
