About a half-dozen students were forced to evacuate their dorm rooms at the 301 Residence Hall earlier this month after a pipe burst, sending water gushing into their bedrooms. With a chunk of a wall missing, water gushed through a student’s room, leaving a pool of water that started to rapidly cover the floor.
Officials at the freshman residence hall evacuated seven students after the HVAC pipe burst on the third floor of the building on Oct. 11 and relocated the students to the Loeb Hall dorms, where they stayed for four days while repairs were made.
The leak caused damage to one student suite as well as the common area below, New School spokesperson Merrie Snead said.
Rylan Florence, a first-year political science major, was one of the students relocated to Loeb.
Florence and his roommates live on the third floor, where the pipe burst. Water flooded their dorm room, seeping into the common area below, including the first-floor lobby.
“I was working in the mailroom, and I [went] outside and I [saw] it raining down from [the] ceiling,” Rylan said.
The affected students were sent to Loeb Hall shortly after.
At first, Florence and the maintenance staff believed that the room’s air conditioning unit was leaking and the staff began repairing the damage. However, soon enough, the leak worsened and Florence and his roommates were escorted out into the hallway. They were told to pack up their things to move dorms that day.
Florence said he and his roommates were left wondering when they could return home while they waited out the repairs.
“I feel like there was definitely some communication errors,” Florence told The New School Free Press. “We were supposed to go back on a Friday and by Thursday, we had gotten no communication back from the school. So, we didn’t really know the state of our room.”
Finally, on Friday, Oct. 14, Florence was notified that he could move back to his dorm room.
Once moving back in, Florence stated that the situation went back to normal fairly quickly. Parts of the building suffered water damage, including Florence’s room and a few of his belongings — a couple of chargers and a printer were damaged, but he was able to salvage everything except one charger.
He said he was also left with a large clean-up job thanks to the amount of water that emptied into his room.
“I had to wash everything,” Florence said. “The one issue was that the water from the pipe ended up everywhere. The people who [were] working in the room just kind of [threw] everything [on] the bed.”
The university is now working on completing repairs in the common spaces of the residence hall.