BDAC flood causes damage

This archived article was written by: Morgan Verdi

If the campus and parking wasn’t torn up enough already, the Bunnell-Dmitrich Athletic Center flooding the week before classes started. It all started with a main water line that comes into the BDAC.
Coach Dave Paur said, “The line is a six-inch line that reduces to a four-inch line and that’s the line that broke. We had a lot of water coming in and it bubbled out of the service closet where the water softener is and it spread really fast.
“Luckily it happened around one in the afternoon so there were people in the BDAC at the time so they called someone and they were able to get it shut off.
“If it would have happened at night, the racquet ball courts and the new floors on the basketball court, would have all been damaged so even though we never want to see things like this happen, it happened at a time that really saved us.”
USU Eastern maintenance personnel and Service Master came and helped get everything cleaned up. Paur said, “After things inside were cleaned, we had the contractors come in and they dug about a 10 to12 foot hole where the pipe break was and that took about four or five days to replace that pipe.”
Along with the parking lot being torn up in order to replace the pipe, walls have to be repainted and carpet has to be replaced. Paur said, “There is a lot of excavating work that has to be done outside, there has also been a lot of work that has had to be done on the inside as regards to cleaning the BDAC.
“Our staff has put in a lot of hours to clean up everything, and at one time we had six Service Master vehicles at the BDAC all at once, so there was quite a bit of damage done.”
Thankfully the flood didn’t affect the equipment in the BDAC, but it did affect all the offices. Paur said, “All the offices were affected by the flood. If you look around the BDAC, none of the offices have been put back together yet, we had huge fans drying everything out and now walls have to be repainted and some carpet has to be replaced along with things like floor boards.”
The BDAC was closed for about a week because of the flooding which made the first week of school even harder. Thankfully the BDAC is up and running again and new pipes have been put in to try and prevent this from happening again.