E-mail Lists Down After Thayer Basement Flood

Harvard Computer Society’s (HCS) e-mail servers were down for a day after a sprinkler pipe ruptured Friday and flooded its office in the basement of Thayer Hall.

The pipe burst left the basement of Thayer under an inch of water, dampening the offices of several student organizations, including HCS and the International Review Council (IRC).

“Much of the [HCS] office was damaged and all servers and equipment has been unplugged while the water clean-up occurs, Assistant Dean of the College Paul J. McLoughlin II wrote in an e-mail to student group heads. “For fire safety reasons, this equipment cannot be plugged back in until the water clean-up is completed.”

The HCS servers, which run the e-mail lists of several hundred organizations and nine House open lists, were revived late Saturday afternoon after being down for about 30 hours, though group websites and e-mail accounts remained inaccessible, according to Gregory N. Price ’06, incoming HCS president.

At about 2 p.m. on Friday, Norman P. Ho ’07 said he was sitting in one of the IRC offices when he heard a “heavy thump,” which he passed off as falling snow. Minutes later a fire alarm evacuated the building, bringing with it fire trucks and police cars.

“When I returned to Thayer, I saw sheets of water,” Ho, the under-secretary-general of administration of Harvard National Model United Nations (HNMUN), also housed in Thayer basement, wrote in an e-mail. “The water flooded significant areas of our main hallway, some of our storage spaces, and parts of some offices. Overall, we didn’t sustain any major damage, thankfully.”

IRC Vice President of Operations Todd van Stolk-Riley ’06 confirmed that there was little damage to his organization’s office. The water level was not high enough to ruin the computers, he said, but noted that about 50 paperback copies of the Harvard International Review were lost to the waters.

Van Stolk-Riley, one of the first students notified by Ho about the flooding, was more concerned with the damage HCS sustained. “Those damages can cause more trouble than we know,” he said.

Members of the IRC and HCS said Facilities Maintenance Operations (FMO) and Yard Operations quickly responded to the flood scene. “FMO was there with industrial fans and dehumidifiers within half an hour,” van Stolk-Riley said.

In addition, the IRC sent in their own team of members to “move sensitive things to higher ground and throw away wet stuff before it caught mold,” Ho wrote in an e-mail.

Van Stolk-Riley said he was told Richard L. Picott, the Yard Operations manager for freshman dorms and Dudley House, that the pipe burst was caused by an open window in an IRC office. But van Stolk-Riley disagreed saying that the window in question had not been open since mid-December. “It’s no big deal,” said van Stolk-Riley. “We just don’t want to be blamed for having the windows open if we didn’t.”

Price said that the FMO suspected a problem with the air conditioning unit or that a window in the HCS office was left unlatched blowing open the window and freezing the pipe.

The FMO could not be reached for comment this weekend.

With the clean up well on its way and little material damage, van Stolk-Riley said the incident will get students to think more seriously about flood protection—and upgrading their offices.

“The carpeting was getting very threadbare—maybe we’ll get some remodeling out of it,” he said.