Possible Sewage Leak Shuts Down Leverett Dining Hall

Dirty, malodorous water seeped into the Leverett House dining hall yesterday morning, prompting the dining hall’s manager to close the serving area and bar students from entering until dinner.

The water leaked through a floor drain underneath the salad bar during breakfast hours.

Though the exact cause of the flood is still unknown, a sewage leak was initially suspected.

Leverett House Superintendent Paul J. Hegarty sent an e-mail to residents just after 10 a.m. telling them to stay out of the house dining hall as well as the private dining room and junior and senior common rooms, while a crew worked to curtail and clean up after the flood.

“The water was not really clean and the place stunk, so we decided it wasn’t a good decision to serve food,” Hegarty said. “I don’t think anyone felt like eating once they walked in there,” he added.

Leverett Dining Hall Manager Arthur Robins chose to close the dining hall for lunch and posted a sign redirecting would-be diners to the Winthrop or Quincy dining halls.

“I got on the phone with the other dining halls and told them, ‘the Leverett kids are coming, and they’re hungry,’” Robins said.

Robins sought the assistance of the University’s Department of Environmental Health and Safety, which, he said, brought in an outside contractor to remove the liquid and sanitize the area.

In an attempt to determine the cause of the flood, maintenance workers inspected students’ quarters.

Michael V. Tucci ’06 and Joshua R. Klimkiewicz ’06, residents of Leverett’s D entryway, which contains the dining hall, said they awoke to the sound of a plumber knocking on their door to investigate possible links between plumbing problems and the flood.

“He concentrated on our toilet, kept flushing it, and talked to people downstairs on his radio to see if when it was flushing it caused more flooding,” Klimkiewicz said.

Through e-mails, Hegarty asked residents of McKinlock Hall—commonly known as Old Leverett­—to refrain from using sinks, showers, and toilets until after 2:30 p.m., while workers attempted to keep damage to a minimum and identify the origin of the flooding.

Though the flood’s source remained a mystery, the Leverett dining hall had reopened its doors to students by dinnertime yesterday.

But as students trickled back in, they observed that the dining hall had not regained an air of normalcy.

“It smells kind of weird,” said Kristin F. Nyborg ’06 yesterday evening. “It does not smell like this normally.”

Despite the olfactory unpleasantness, Robins said he felt that keeping the dining hall closed for dinner would have been too great an inconvenience for Leverett residents.

The relatively expedited cleanup did not come at the expense of quality, Hegarty said.

Safety was the primary factor in the decision to reopen the dining hall’s doors, he added. “I’m positive that [EHS] would not re-open the dining hall if it weren’t safe.”

—Staff writer Matthew S. Lebowitz can be reached at mslebow@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Nina L. Vizcarrondo can be reached at nvizcarr@fas.harvard.edu.