A broken radiator coil led to the flooding of parts of Chadbourne Residence Hall Saturday, displacing residents for the afternoon and causing minimal damage to dorm rooms and students' possessions.
The coil broke during the late morning hours in a seventh-floor room of Chadbourne's west wing, as rooms filled with up to an inch of standing water that leaked down to lower floors.
The hallway was just a big puddle,"" said Sam Seater, a UW-Madison freshman and seventh-floor resident. ""From what I heard, the combination of having the heat on with the really cold temperatures made the pipes burst and then the water started spewing out of [the room's] air conditioning unit.""
Residents and custodians cleaned up the mess by Saturday night, according to Jerid Dickman, a UW-Madison freshman and Chadbourne front desk employee.
""We had 30-some custodians here and all the maintenance people - everyone was here helping each other clean up,"" he said. ""It went really smoothly.""
According to Seater, many residents were still asleep when the coil broke, so one of the residents of the room with the initial flooding ran up and down the hallway knocking on doors. She said she quickly moved all her things from her floor onto her bed and unplugged all her electronics.
""In my room we could see that the water was coming, so we had time to get all my stuff up,"" Seater said. ""It was pretty frantic and a lot of the girls were gone, so we had to get stuff out of their rooms too.""
Seater said the water ruined rugs, shoes and other things normally kept on the floor, but she said she had not heard of any major possessions being damaged.
""There was a posting on the wall explaining what happened and saying basically they won't reimburse anybody if something got ruined - that you'd have to contact your insurance or something like that,"" she said.
The Division of University Housing was unavailable for comment as of press time.
