Efforts Underway to Address Villages Flooding
Ada Lambert and Cal Dooley | February 11, 2024
On Wednesday, January 22, two days after Warren Wilson College (WWC) students returned to campus for the spring semester, residents of a Villages A suite arrived home to find inches of water on the floor. A pipe had burst in the attic area due to the freezing temperatures.
Haden Mason, a resident of the flooded suite, returned around noon when he saw firefighters outside of Villages. When he entered, there was water pooling from his room — which was where the damage first occurred.
“I initially panicked about [my cat] Chipmunk, but I walked into the suite and there was water coming down the hallway, and people were coming in and out, and you could hear the water pouring out of the ceiling fan,” Mason said. “Chipmunk was up above the [living room window]. He was wet and afraid, and he had to be manhandled by a fireman to get him down.”
At first, Mason was unsure of what to do. First Onsite, the property damage company WWC is insured with was focusing on moving industrial fans into the suites to dry the rooms out and removing wet items from the suite. The lack of guidance left Mason and his suitemates feeling restless.
“Once things had finally settled down, several First Onsite people were talking outside and I was like, ‘Hey, what do we need to be doing right now?’ And they told me we needed to get everything that we needed for the next two months out,” Mason said. “That's the only thing I heard. Later, our Resident Assistant (RA) [Alder Donovan-Cook] came by and told us the same thing. There was very little communication. We were walking around with no idea what was going on.”
Photo by Cal Dooley, Echo Staff
Donovan-Cook was also displaced as the flooding seeped down into his suite. Still, he was happy to assist his residents during the relocation process that took place the following days with the help of Residence Life (Res Life), particularly Tacci Smith, associate dean of student engagement.
“I think things were handled as well as they could be by Res life,” Donovan-Cook said. “I want to give a huge shout-out to [Smith], she was working constantly throughout the process, handling all of the messy details and paperwork while I was at Villages getting initial assessments of the damage and helping the folks displaced figure out where we were going to end up. She worked her ass off to make sure people were housed as soon as possible.”
Photo by Anastasia Duich, resident of Villages B suite.
A little over 24 hours later, a suite in Villages B suffered a similar fate. Raquel Stearns had just returned home when a pipe in their living room wall ruptured with enough force to knock a sizable hole out of the drywall.
“It was like, ‘Okay, there's like a little bit of water running down the pictures that we have on the wall, and then I blinked and there was a hole in the wall,” Stearns said.
Stearns, with the help of roommates and neighbors, began frantically grabbing belongings to protect them from damage. Within minutes there was a few inches of water on their floor and a small wake flowing from their front door to form a waterfall into the basement.
Photo by Cal Dooley, Echo Staff
The last time this issue occurred was in late December 2022, in which Villages A and B experienced flooding due to extended freezing temperatures. When residents returned to campus from winter break, they were asked to pack their belongings and coordinate with Smith to figure out where to go.
The flooding displaced 77 students, a stark contrast to this recent incident, affecting 13 students in total. Due to the volume, many of the residents had to move off-campus to Blue Ridge Assembly, which is roughly twenty minutes away. The Villages buildings were being repaired for a little over a year and reopened in the 2024 spring semester. Since then, safety precautions have been put in place to mitigate the issue — still, Villages remain at risk when temperatures drop low due to major infrastructure flaws.
“Luckily we made it through the break, because [last time] it happened during the break, and we had realized that the temperature was very low, and the apartments, normally, we say, turn down your heat or turn down your radiators,” Smith said. “That's part of the like checkout at the winter time. So this time it was very much like, ‘No, no, Villages do not turn yours down.’ [Tate] made sure that from there they knew how they could control it and were able to make sure that it was bumped up. So that that probably helped in why it didn't damage more.”
Though Donovan-Cook is thankful for Res Life’s efforts to reduce the impact, he's disappointed that such incidents have reoccurred during his time at WWC.
“I know that a big part of this issue is due to the way the buildings were designed in the first place, but the fact is that we are at an institution that actively makes living off-campus, while being an active member of the college community, difficult,” Donovan-Cook said. “This is supposed to be balanced by the implicit promise that upperclassmen have access to apartment-style suites in Villages, but between the additional costs that living in these spaces incur due to the pricing of singles, the multiple instances of these buildings flooding and causing distress and property damage to their residents is inexcusable.”
In a discussion with Clarence Tate, director of facilities, he provided additional insight into the potential causes of the flooding and highlighted ongoing efforts to find a solution.
“Villages is run by radiant heat floors, which back when they were built was a thing, but radiant heat is something you probably don't want to do in a commercial, residential dorm,” Tate said. “It's more so for a bathroom floor or your house, or something like that. But this school is big on sustainability practices, and they were probably experimenting with some of the sustainability practices.”
Due to the time required for heat to rise from the radiant floors, many Villages suites struggled to maintain warmth during the recent freeze, putting pipes at risk. With radiant heat being difficult to remove, facilities have been exploring solutions that would protect the pipes without requiring a complete rebuild of the buildings.
“It doesn't have to be completely redone,” Tate said “We're going to use some of the new technologies that they have today. We've been researching this since I first came here because this happened before I even came here. This has happened eight times in total.”
Despite a solution being in the works, there has been a lack of funding allocated for the system that would work best — particularly due to the price, which would round out to roughly a quarter million dollars.
“We're looking at a system called dry standpipe which is a sprinkler system that holds no water whatsoever, unless there's an actual fire,” Tate said “Then pumps pressurize and push it through really quick.”
Tate confirmed that a proposal has been sent to the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) for the purchase and installation of a dry standpipe in Villages to prevent further flooding.
“They're going to fix it this time,” Tate said. “We have a group in now that is going to bite the bullet and just pay to get it done the right way.”
After the flooding occurred, many other residents of Villages were left wondering if their suites were at risk and what they might do to prevent it.
When questioned about the lack of correspondence between residence life and Villages residents after the flooding had occurred, Gilbert Hinga, the vice president of student engagement and dean of students, explained that since most of the residents were aware of the situation by proximity, they did not feel the need to formally notify students.
In hindsight, Hinga acknowledged that communication could have been helpful for students and has resolved to consider what information may be useful moving forward.
“[Students] could see what was happening,” Hinga said. “But part of what I'm hearing is that even though [they are] there, we should not assume students know what to do. There needs to be more active information about ‘this is what happened, this is what you need to do to mitigate it,’ and whatever that is.”
Residents displaced from Villages A were told they could move back into their suites in late March, depending on how long repairs take and when parts arrive. Meanwhile, Villages B residents are scheduled to return within the next week.