On Oct. 1, student employees arrived at McKenzie Hall to find an inch of water on the floor and a fallen ceiling tile in a computer room at the Social Science Instructional Labs.
No one was surprised.
The smaller of two computer labs on the fourth floor floods at least once every fall term, according to the staff. This time, no computers were damaged.
“I got a phone call from one of my employees, and she said, ‘Oh, I just went in the lab and it’s full of water,’” said Cathleen Leue, director of the SSIL. “This is a problem we’ve had every year – the first rain, we always get some dripping.”
The most recent leak dumped 80 gallons of rain into the room, filling it with about an inch of water, Assistant Director of SSIL Garron Hale said.
The lab is primarily a resource for geography students’ cartography projects, but it also contains one of the few distance education testing centers on campus. Between the two labs there are 55 computer stations and two instructors’ centers. The SSIL moved to their current location in the summer of 2000, and employees say they’ve been plagued by leaks ever since.
Staff members attribute the leaks to an old, poorly-designed roof and say the leaks will not end until a new roof is built. The rubber covering on the flat roof cracks in the heat of the sun, and water drips down after large rains, Hale said.
He added that although maintenance crews frequently fix the cracks, new ones appear and it’s difficult to determine where the leak begins because the water travels through the fifth floor before arriving on the fourth.
“It has to get through a lot of concrete to get here … it’ll just follow a seam in the rubber to a crack, then it leaks,” he said.
Hale said the flooding is a regular occurrence since the SSIL relocated five years ago.
“It was here with the building. It’s never been fixed, to my knowledge,” he said.
Facilities Services would not comment because their roofer is out of town.
After the water from the most recent leak was cleaned up, the University gave the SSIL tarps to protect the computers against further damage.
Employees say the leaks have caused setbacks and difficulties for the lab.
The first flood they experienced caused $1,000 worth of damages to two video monitors, employees say, but the insurance only covered $500 worth of loss.
“Since they’re $500 each, I lost two of them and had to pay for one,” Leue said.
Since then, the deductible has been raised to $5,000, and Leue is seriously concerned about further damage.
“I could lose up to $5,000 of equipment, and I’d have to pay that $5,000,” she said. “The problem is one of those that they can’t just keep patching.”
Rick Gorman, a system administrator for SSIL, said the problem must be rectified or more damage will occur.
“Fortunately, this time we didn’t get any damage, but if we had, I’d be working quickly to solve the problem,” Gorman said. “It’s a pain with a capital P.”
Leue and Hale said their lab is not the only room in McKenzie troubled by leaks.
“There was an area where water was just pouring down the Robinson Theatre doorway … it was a big avalanche of water,” Leue said.
Lab employee Ryan Vann said leaks are typical at Oregon public schools.
“My high school was way under-funded, and leaking was a pretty typical occurrence, so it doesn’t seem like a big deal to me … but on the other hand, there is $1,000 machinery in there, so it’d be nice to protect it from water damage.”
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