c/o Peyton De Winter
A section of the third floor of Bennet Hall flooded on Wednesday, Jan. 22. The leak occurred after heavy snowfall and several days of unusually cold weather, with temperatures reaching a low of 10 degrees Fahrenheit.
“The leak was caused by the cold weather freezing a coil in an exhaust recovery unit, which brings air in and out of bathrooms,” Associate Director of Facilities Management Jeffrey Sweet wrote in an email to The Argus. “When the frozen coil thawed, it sent water down to the third floor of the dorm.”
The leak began above a closet in a third-floor room at around 2 p.m. After a few minutes, the water had progressed to the hallway, damaging the carpeting and seeping into other rooms on the hall. To make sure that the water wasn’t spilling over, two residents placed trash cans in the hallway.
“A lot of water was actually pouring into my room and there was a slight crack in the ceiling of my room where a little bit of water was coming out,” Ethan Dangel ’28 said. “I used up a lot of towels trying to mop everything up and the room smelled for a bit, that’s for sure. I’ve kind of drowned it out but I’d rather not be here.”
The water had begun to seep to the opposite side of the hallway before the leak was stopped. Residents of the affected area had to scramble to resettle their belongings just hours after returning from Winter Break.
“My life has been kind of uprooted,” Alesandra Ozbek ’28 said. “I’ve always had a lot of clothes. It was already hardly fitting. And we had to move all of it into my roommate’s closet. Some of it’s under my bed. Things are just on the floor. And we have people coming in and out. It’s pretty much ruined the [organizational] system that I’ve built over the last semester. We’re hoping to get a speedy patch-up for the ceiling and everything, but until then we’re kind of just sitting ducks.”
The problem was exacerbated due to a disconnect between the draining unit and the building’s automated shut-off system, which prevented Physical Plant from getting alerts. Once the leak was successfully reported, Physical Plant used fans and a dehumidifier to dry the room before repairing and repainting the affected areas.
The repairs caused a disturbance for the residents on the affected floor, which turned the area into a work zone for the majority of the week and temporarily shut off elevator access.
“It’s been loud living here because they put these industrial-sized fans in our room,” Sophia Landers ’28 said. “[They’re] quite annoying to sleep with and deal with.”
While Physical Plant removed the fans and dehumidifier on Sunday, Jan. 26, related repairs in the area continued for another week. Some students expressed dissatisfaction with the slow pace of the repairs and disruption to their daily lives which the accident had caused.
“There’s people coming in and out of our room, multiple times a day, trying to fix our room and cut holes in the ceiling and put new fans in and take things out, so it’s been difficult,” Landers said.
Several floods have occurred at campus residences in recent years. Most notably, the Butterfields flooded three times between 2018 and 2023. The Office of Residential Life has advised students to close all windows when leaving their residences for more than 12 hours, while Physical Plant has reprogrammed the draining system to prevent such problems from happening in the future.
Raiza Goel can be reached at rgoel@wesleyan.edu.