By Esther Hoffman, junior
Students and staff in Casado Campus Center had to leave the building to go to the bathroom on Feb. 16.
“Sumpter and Davis kind of became our secondary homes for a couple hours,” said Allen Eberwein, Casado director.
Maintenance staff shut off the water in Casado for almost two hours to reroute water to a new piping system, which will replace a pipe that had a potentially dangerous leak.
The leaky part of the three-inch copper pipe was outside the building, buried beneath the concrete loading dock on the west side, so maintenance staff had no way to access it. It led to the closet behind the elevator downstairs in Casado.
Paul Winchester, director of the Physical Plant, said the staff discovered the leak a week before Cherry Carnival and were monitoring the situation and working on a solution that would cause the least inconvenience.
There was no apparent cause for the pipe leak.
“People make these parts — people weld them together,” said Winchester. “I have seen those parts last for 50 years, and I’ve seen some of them that go in three or four years.”
The team dug a ditch on the west side of Casado to get to the new location for the pipe system, which enters the building in the downstairs men’s restroom. The water flows from a meter between Casado and Sumpter Hall.
While the water issue was being resolved Feb. 16, some people might have left the building because of the smell.
The smell was unrelated to the pipe leak.
Winchester explained that the city requires Casado to have a grease interceptor— a tank that separates grease from waste water coming from the kitchen — so that grease will not get into the city water.
About every two months, the grease, which floats to the top in the 1,000-gallon tank under the loading dock, is sucked out into a waste truck.
Because the grease is exposed to the outside air, the smell floats into Casado’s fresh air intake vents, which carry it inside, where the smell is noticeable.
The tank truck was there Feb. 16, sucking out the grease behind the kitchen at Casado.