Freshman Jenny Shull did what most people would do when black liquid started pouring down from the sprinkler in her Blackwell dorm room Thursday night.
“I just started screaming,” she said. “I didn’t know what it was, and a million things went through my head.”
The sprinkler head in Blackwell Dormitory’s room 206 broke when Shull’s roommate put a hanger on it, causing it to spew a flame-retardant liquid that was a combination of sulphur and water, Shull said. After 40 minutes the torrent subsided, leaving Blackwell residents with the unpleasant task of cleaning up inches of standing water and the resulting damage.
Because the flooding was relatively shallow, most of the damage was restricted to things that had been on the floor, like books and clothing. Residence Life and Housing Services provided residents with free laundry services Friday to help them clean up and ensure that mold would not grow. Blackwell Graduate Assistant Sarah Andrews said as of Sunday night, the dorm was declared “almost 100 percent dry.”
Residence Coordinator Clay Adams sent an e-mail to Blackwell residents urging them to “take pictures, log detailed notes, and hold onto any items that you may wish to claim against a parent’s homeowners insurance policy.”
Although Duke holds insurance for the building itself, residents said they were not aware of a policy covering their personal possessions. This is the third time a dorm has flooded in recent years—Keohane Quadrangle in 2002 and Randolph Dormitory the year before. After the previous incidents, students complained that the University was not responsive enough and did not cover all of the damages.
Dorm residents worked for three hours Thursday night to clear the standing water from dorm rooms and hallways into bathroom drains or down stairwells and out the building’s side exits.
“The RAs and residents who helped to clean the standing water saved a huge amount of money with their efforts,” Andrews said. “By the time the cleanup crews got here, there was almost no standing water anymore. They just had to dry out the carpets.”
The University contracted AfterDisaster, a company that specializes in flood and fire cleanup, to deal with the aftermath of the flooding. The company arrived at Blackwell about two hours after the sprinkler broke and proceeded to install industrial-sized fans and dehumidifiers in the affected hallways and dorm rooms.
In total, about a dozen rooms on the second floor and about seven rooms on the first floor were flooded. For the past few days, residents in those rooms have slept in other rooms on campus or in commons rooms.
“There’s a lot of damage in my room. It got everything in the closets drenched with sulphur and water,” Shull said. “I still can’t get on my laptop because my power cords were underwater. All my hair appliances and cords and things like that don’t work.”
When the sprinkler broke, fire alarms throughout the dorm sounded and Blackwell residents evacuated the building. They waited outside for 45 minutes while the Duke University Police Department and the Durham Fire Department responded to the flooding.
“There’s a fire safety issue with turning off the sprinklers,” Andrews said. “You can’t turn off that one sprinkler, you have to turn off the entire system.” After the emergency crews determined that there was no threat of a real fire, they shut off the water flow to the building.
When students were finally allowed to return to the dorm, the hallway with the broken sprinkler and the first-floor hallway directly beneath it were submerged in a few inches of water. “I was walking through Blackwell when they allowed us to go back in, and everything was dry. Suddenly we turned the corner and our hallway was completely flooded,” second-floor resident Joy Basu said.
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