The end of January came to a shocking end for those students living in the senior apartments. Senior Apartment A flooded due to the water sprinkler in the building. The freezing and thawing out of the water line caused water to enter into a majority of the apartments causing damage to the ceilings, kitchens and floors.

With the sudden damage, many students had to evacuate as quickly as possible packing up as much as they could.

Head of Campus Facilities Rick Ewing and his team responded to the situation as quickly as possible.

“We have experienced personnel who worked with us during this emergency,” Ewing said. “With things such as the water line breaking, we do have a protocol to go by. This ensures that everyone is safe and that the area is clear for people to enter back in,” Ewing said.

The protocol is broken into various parts. The first and main part is the safety of the students in the building.

“The questions we ask are: what is the issue? Are the residence safe and protected? And we want to thank the students for being very cooperative with us. It definitely made the clean up much quicker,” Ewing said.

The next part of the protocol is finding the cause of the damage.

“In this case, the broken water line is our focus. From turning the water off to getting everything situated to see what needs to be done,” Ewing said.

The final step is to clean.

“Our team extracted as much water as possible so our building team can go in and replace the insulation, ceilings and floors,” Ewing said. “From shampooing the carpet to fixing ceilings, the safety of the students was our main concern.”

From repairing everything to actually living there, it is a whole different view.

Senior Kate Culver was one of the students whose apartments were affected by the flooding.

“It happened Tuesday January 22 and only two of my roommates were in the apartment when it started,”Culver said.

Culver and her roommates were instructed to pack bags and evacuate the building.

All of the students were able to be placed into temporary housing for the time being. The water line for the sprinkler system was shut down which caused the building not to be inhabited by the students.

“The whole building was evacuated the night it happened because they had to shut down the sprinkler system. We had to find a place to stay the first night, and the next day we received emails about getting rooms in Kilhefner for our displacement,” Culver said. “One of my roommates was able to stay across the hall with another apartment who had a roommate currently student-teaching. My other two roommates and myself had moved temporarily into rooms we were displaced in.”

The students received a notification on Feb. 1 allowing them to move back into their apartments.

“It was around 6:30 p.m. when my roommate Nicole Miller and I had moved all of our stuff from Kil back to our apartment. It was a long day for sure,” Culver said.

Students were given swipes to compensate for the flood. Culver and two of her roommates, who are nursing majors, were given a different form of compensation.

“We asked if there was a way we could get swipes to nest or something at the college of nursing since our hours for clinical, class and lab do not always match up to convo’s hours,” Culver said. “We were permitted $30 a day but were told to be sure to keep our receipts so we would be reimbursed through meals too from convo and additional dining.”

The water damage to Culver’s apartment mostly affected the ceiling, floor and walls but there was some damage to the rooms themselves.
“The damage was pretty bad. The ceilings, floors and walls were all damaged. It was our kitchen, dining and living areas that were affected mostly. Our bedrooms and bathrooms were fine,” Culver said.

In the end, it all worked out with the many teams involved.

“At the time of the event, I thought it wasn’t handled well because there was a lot of things being said by a lot of different people and it was chaotic, stressful and overwhelming,” Culver said. “But they [facilities] acted really fast and kept good communication with those who were affected and we got to move back in earlier than we originally expected.”