Leaks still affect students

Two sprinkler system leaks in Pennsylvania and Amos Hall, caused by below-freezing… Two sprinkler system leaks in Pennsylvania and Amos Hall, caused by below-freezing temperatures last Monday, have some Pitt residents worried about the efficiency of University maintenance.

At Pennsylvania Hall, which houses 420 upperclassmen, a sprinkler head in the eighth floor lounge froze and ruptured, causing the fire alarms to sound, while students evacuated around noon on Jan. 21. The evacuation lasted around 25 to 30 minutes and emergency vehicles responded within 10 to 15 minutes.

Around 2:45 p.m. a sprinkler line froze in the Amos Hall fitness center, which caused the head to break, flooding the gym.

The 152 residents evacuated the building for about five minutes.

The leaks, which occurred about two hours apart, affected seven floor lounges and four student rooms in Pennsylvania Hall and the fitness center of Amos Hall.

After speaking with the University’s Facilities Management department, Pitt’s spokesman Morgan Kelly said yesterday that the damage will be fixed “as soon as possible.”

Kelly said that the water soaked Pennsylvania Hall’s eighth floor lounge and seeped all the way to the second floor lounge and that some ceiling tiles on the sixth and seventh floors were lost. However, he said the damage was minimal and typical of problems involving water leaks.

The problem, Kelly said, was mainly wet carpeting and baseboards and that in both dorms the water pipes were not exposed to the outside. However, they were close to the roof and still affected by temperatures of less than 10 degrees.

Facilities Management said that earlier in the year, workers made a hole in the ceiling of the eighth floor lounge to put insulation and a heater around the pipe so that it would not freeze.

But the hole remained open and the pipes froze.

Mike Sirera, a resident assistant on Pennsylvania Hall’s eighth floor, said that maintenance crews came right after the evacuation, and there was a group effort to help clean up the damaged lounges.

“I don’t know if anything could have been handled differently,” said Sirera. “They had a lot of housekeeping up there to help. Everyone was nice about it.”

He said that three quarters of his room flooded, but the most damage occurred in the room of sophomores Becca Selah and Meg Patton, located across from the eighth floor lounge.

Selah and Patton, sophomore residents of Pennsylvania Hall, said that their double room, the common room in their suite and part of an adjoining room flooded with one or two inches of water. Maintenance workers dry-vacuumed the carpet, ripped off all the molding, put all of their property on pink Styrofoam lifters and placed industrial-strength fans in the room.

“It was pretty much uninhabitable,” said Patton. “It smelled a little like sulfur water.”

Selah said that the water damaged some textbooks and soaked a lot of their clothes, so they washed $16 worth of laundry.

While the room was being restored, Panther Central offered the students rooms at Centre Plaza and Lothrop Hall, but both Selah and Patton stayed with friends because of convenience.

They said that when they first called Panther Central to report the flooding, the office didn’t believe that their room was flooded, and several residents had called to report the hole in the ceiling before the incident occurred. But to their knowledge no one responded. Panther Central would not respond to this incident when contacted by The Pitt News. It is still unclear whether the flooding in Amos affected any equipment in the fitness center. Junior Katie Henry, a resident of Amos Hall, said she feels as if the building is not getting enough attention from maintenance staff.

She said that the laundry machines stopped working and elevators broke down twice in one week, in addition to the sprinkler leak in the fitness center.

“I’m an avid gym goer,” she said. “All of the residents in the Quad lost access to a 24-hour gym. It’s inconvenient to go to Bellefield [Hall] or the Petersen [Events Center] to work out.”