3 On-campus residential halls without water for 24 hours last week
Residents of three on-campus residential halls — Moen, Reeder and Greaves — went without water for about 24 hours, starting the morning of Sept. 24.
On Tuesday, Sept. 22, there were students who noticed a leak outside of Reeder Hall in a grassy area and alerted Utah State University facilities, said Kirk Bird, director of Housing Facilities on campus.
After digging up the area by the leak, facilities found that a major pipe had broken and that a part needed to be replaced, Bird said. The part came in by Wednesday afternoon, so housing alerted students in the three halls about the water being shut off on Thursday for the repairs to take place.
“It was really facilities who took care of it, we were at their discretion the whole time,” Bird said. “We were just trying to keep the residents happy while it was happening.”
And with the pizza housing delivered for the students Thursday night, there wasn’t much need to cook, something hindered by the lack of water, said Silvia Smith, a junior living in Greaves Hall.
“It wasn’t too big of a problem,” Smith said. “We live on campus, so there are bathrooms everywhere … They brought us water bottles, so we could go get water from our well of bottles downstairs if we needed it.”
All residents received an email about what was happening, as well as showering options nearby. Students could go to the Mountain View and Valley View Towers or the HPER building to shower.
USU Maintenance dropped off portable toilets near all of the halls for students to use while water was shut off, Bird said.
Facilities would have turned on the water sooner, but new concrete needed to be poured over the area with the repaired pipe and have time to dry, so they planned to turn water back on early Friday morning.
Though they were told in an email that the water would be on around 6:30 a.m. Thursday, Ryan Green, a sophomore living in Reeder, said that he wasn’t able to use any water from his apartment until he came back from an 8:30 a.m. class on Friday. However, he said that being able to use showers at other buildings on campus was helpful.
“They told us everything they knew,” Green said. “It was just unfortunate that it happened … But we got free pizza out of it.”
The email sent to students mentioned that workers would need to come into some of the rooms around 6 a.m. to start setting up the toilets for use, so not everything could come on at the same time. Water was on around 7 a.m. in Greaves, said Smith, which was what she expected.
— mandy.m.morgan@aggiemail.usu.edu