A burst pipe near the College-in-the-Woods residential community left students without water for nearly five hours yesterday while Physical Facilities worked to repair the problem that shut water off to the all CIW buildings, including the dining hall.
According to a spokeswoman for Physical Facilities, they were alerted to a plumbing problem when low water pressure was reported at around 4:30 a.m.
Maintenance workers diagnosed the first leak at the edge of the tree line at Lot O1, near Cayuga, and were originally going to create a bypass that would provide the dining hall with water. The backhoe hit another valve while they were digging, knocking it off and prompting them to turn off all water to CIW while the pipe was repaired.
The water was shut off to the buildings at around 10 a.m., and full service resumed at 3 p.m. after the plumbing was flushed out and chlorinated.
Mike Rice, a plumber who was working on the site, said that he found a 3- to 4-inch crack in the iron duct pipe.
These kinds of pipe are usually long-lasting, said Karen Fennie, the spokeswoman for Physical Facilities. She added that there would not be a larger inspection of pipes in the area.
“Sometimes it happens because of ground shifting, and that looks like what happened,” Fennie said.
The pipes are original to the CIW complex, which was completed in 1973. There have been no other leaks in that area, she said, and Facilities will therefore not be doing additional checks on plumbing.
“I’m sure it was very inconvenient for the students,” Fennie said.
But for many of the dorm’s residents, the lack of water proved to be little more than a slight and temporary inconvenience.
“I couldn’t shower, but it wasn’t too bad,” said Dan Holdsworth, a sophomore English major and resident of Onandaga.
Bradley Kramer, also of Onandaga, said that because toilets were “so full of human excrement,” he had been told by a friend that it was necessary to take drastic measures to be able to use them — including standing during defecation. Kramer, a freshman engineering major, added that this was not a strategy he had to resort to.
In addition to residents using other bathroom facilities, students were advised that they had to eat at other dining halls for the day.
But this is not the first plumbing problem to affect CIW this semester. In a Sept. 29 article published in Pipe Dream, some Oneida residents said that they had not had cold water for nearly a year, forcing them to use scalding hot water when they showered or used the hall’s kitchen sinks.
Fennie said any student could call the Physical Facilities customer service number, 777-2226, to submit a service request. To avoid repeat calls about the same problem, she requested that students instead work through the Office of Residential Life to register those requests.