Photo obtained by ESU Bulletin
Most on-campus students returned to their residence halls by Tuesday, Jan. 16, but as Emporia State canceled classes due to the extreme cold, residents of Towers Complex lost the opportunity to relax on their morning off as the building began experiencing issues with flooding, fire alarms, and a broken heating system.
In the early morning hours of Jan. 16, a radiator inside Towers Complex burst causing the bottom four floors of the building to experience flooding. Shortly after, the heating system ceased to function; at 9 a.m. the building fire alarms were activated.
Kayla Smith, Director of Residential Life, explained that freezing temperatures caused the radiator to burst which led to the heating system failing. Smith said there have been some issues with the fire system due to the water and cold weather, but an unrelated detector issue set the alarm off.
“Safety was the top priority,” Smith said. “While we might assume [the fire alert] is because of the cold or the water, we have to treat it like it could be a real fire and follow those practices fully.”
The ResLife team encouraged Towers residents to escape the cold elsewhere until the issue was resolved.
“We contacted Tech Electronics, which is the contractor we work with on our fire system, right away to make sure the issue was fully resolved and we would not have more issues throughout the day,” she said.
The Topeka company arrived at Towers Complex around 11 a.m. and resolved the alarm issue quickly. Stover’s Restoration worked to dry the flooded floors out and completed the job by Thursday, Jan. 18. The flooding occurred on the first through fourth floors of South Tower, two of which are unoccupied by residents.
Due to the flooding, part of the IT equipment in the Towers heating system experienced water damage. This led to the heating system that services the entirety of Towers Complex to stop working. Smith said that IT helped ResLife restore the equipment by 11 a.m.
“We did work with our campus partners to make sure we had back up plans if there were continued issues with the fire or heating systems, but luckily we didn’t have to use those,” Smith said. “We really appreciate our residents and our staff and campus partners’ cooperation for helping everything go smoothly.”