Tenants of Mills Residence Hall room 321 were living an ordinary Thursday afternoon, lounging at home.
“I remember exactly what was happening,” Bristol Stoehr, resident of Mills 321 said. “They were taking care of the cats, […] We heard like a dripping sound, but we didn’t know it was dripping.”
The students, initially caught off-guard by the sound, didn’t take it as anything serious at the moment, suspecting it to be the mischief of one of their cats. It started small, with water starting to drain out from one of the sprinkler heads in the hallway.
“We thought one of the cats had gotten into something, but it was water dripping from the sprinkler,” Stoehr said. “I was on the phone with my dad, it started to pour out water”.
It was their first instinct to fetch someone who could help, but before they could really do anything, the head gave out, and the water started to pour at a dangerously high rate.
“And then before we even had a chance to get help, it just went boom.” Stoehr said. “And we ran out into the hallway and screamed and screamed, and people were like, what the fuck?”, her roommate Bowie Fowler said. “And we were like: [The student paused here to mimic motioning to the room]. We had no words. We were just like: [The student again mimicked motioning to the room], and then water was just already coming out of the room.” Stoehr said.
The students, as any of us would, flew into a panicked state and while waiting for help to arrive, had to step in themselves to rescue some of their belongings.
“We had to run back through the sprinkler and save our cats and they were like, really stressed out.” Fowler said. “ They were just really stressed about like moving around and just doing so much.”
Fowler said the cats were totally unharmed. It was likely around then that the downstairs neighbors in Room 221 began to experience leaking from the upstairs. Though the water was coming in, the students below however, didn’t happen to be in at the time.
“Yeah, from my point of view, I was an hour away eating lunch with my mom in Morganton and then I checked my email and I had like a feeling like, it’s probably in our room,’ and so I called Clay [one of the student’s friends] to go down and check.” Isaac Carr, room 221 resident said. “He’s like, ‘dude, there’s like seven people in your room right now. It’s like flooded. He’s like they won’t let anybody in.’”
The other affected resident of 221, was elsewhere on campus. After his roommate called him to inform him, he rushed back to his dormitory to see for himself.
“So I get back and they didn’t tell me where to go, so I just go to the room. Room’s locked, so I’ll let myself in. There are fans blowing in our room.” Carr’s roommate, Marco Davies said. “It’s like a sauna in there. It was so hot in there, this fans are blowing and I thought to myself, ‘is this really doing anything?’”
At this point, the housing department had stepped in.
“Unfortunately we’ve been through this before so we kind of have a standard process” Assistant Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs at UNCA Vollie Barnwell said. “(We) work with them to begin to get as many of their personal items up off the floor out of the space. f they’re wet, get them bagged up and if they’re not wet, you know, obviously get them out of the space”
While the department worked on saving the dormitory, the students were relocated to emergency on-campus housing, located in Ponder Hall– a huge relief for the still distressed students.
“We were placed in emergency housing in Ponder,” Fowler said. “Which was like an apartment, which was really nice. I’m really glad it was a pretty big apartment and we, all three of us, were able to be in a room together.”
Carr and Davies from room 221 however, had more difficulty getting into their emergency relocation.
“At first they told us 120, and then we go to Ponder 120 and there’s people living there, and we’re like, okay, we were told to move here.” Davies said. “They answered the door and told us that that can’t be true because they live there. So there was a miscommunication on what room we needed to go into.”
Though their room was significantly less damaged than their upstairs neighbors, they still struggled to get to safety. According to the students, they had been told to go to the wrong room, and couldn’t get into their emergency housing without substantial efforts.
“So we never got a key and never got anything– it was probably an hour of us just talking to (our) RA and then our RA getting into contact with people,” Davies said. “He gave us a number to call and we called the RA on a call, and then she’s like, ‘ I don’t really know what to do. I’m gonna call someone else.’”
Though the students were dry and safe in Ponder Hall, they couldn’t say the same for many of their possessions. Both groups of students claimed that the clean-up teams were less than gentle with many of their possessions. The items were placed in garbage bags and relocated to a common room in the upper floors of Mills.
“It almost looked like they had just swept everything off my desk without a look into the bags, it had broken some of my cassettes. They were just sprawled out everywhere in the bag” Davies said. “They threw my Xbox in there as well as my controller and my headphones. So that that made me a little mad, a little frustrated.”
The other students, in 321, corroborated this.
“They also ripped down posters that weren’t affected,” Fowler said. “They literally like ripped it off the wall, crumbled it up and shoved it in a shelf. […] When I went in there, it wasn’t damaged at all. So they took it down for no reason.” Stoehr said.
The students in 321 also spoke about the damages to the room itself, which they claim weren’t properly taken care of by the housing department.
“And then they left this mess in the corner of my room where I put my cat’s litter box. and I was like, ‘you guys didn’t clean the carpets.’” Fowler said. “They said they diligently cleaned the carpets and I’m like, ‘no, you did not. This looks like litter with water, like coated around it.’”
The students noted their wooden shelf had been damaged and left “moldy”, their ceiling poorly repaired with tape, and further discrepancies with what the housing department had told them they would do.
“I do wanna say that they did end up like listening to us, and they fixed all of the issues we had with the room.” Fowler said. “I watched them, going in there and like– scrub that corner.” Stoehr said. “But it’s just like the fact that we even had to ask for, a ceiling to not be taped and for them to properly plaster it is– insane to me, because I would have done that before”
Barnwell said what the students saw and complained about was not the final product.
“The ceiling was kind of a work in progress. so initially there was some patching that was done and some painter tape was put up to hold that patching in place,” Barnwell said. “I think the students looked at that and saw that that was the finished product, which it wasn’t.. and so they asked the question: ‘are you going to just hold our ceilings up with tape?’, which was not the plan.”
The students in 221 were offered claims for some minor damages, the students in 321 were directed to go through their parent’s homeowners insurance, as the school could not guarantee anything.
“The contract that all resident students sign, it does talk about that. It talks about how the university is not responsible for damage that occurs to personal items.” Barnwell said. “So in most cases homeowners insurance does cover when you’re staying in a residence hall. We always encourage students when they’re first coming in to check or families to check with their homeowners insurance.”
Barnwell clarifies how the school decides to compensate students for damaged items while living in a residence hall.
“If it’s one poster that’s damaged and that’s the only thing in the whole suite that needs to be replaced rather than going through tort claims form through the government or doing homeowner insurance, then we may just pay” Barnwell said. “ But if it starts turning into a lot of electronics or a lot of things like that, then that’s not something that in most cases that we would pay to replace”.
He would also explain from a more practical perspective how the sprinkler head burst in the first place.
“When water freezes in a– in a line or in a sprinkler head, it expands and so um the freezing is not what a lot of times what causes a leak, but the expansion a lot of times,” Barnwell said. “January 29, 30, 31st was extremely cold; for several days in a row, temperature stayed below freezing and so things froze and evidently that sprinkler head had froze or the line had frozen had gotten ice and it and so then when it falls out, that’s when the head turned loose”.
Though in the end, everything was accounted for and the students– and their rooms– were physically okay, there was still the emotional damage to work through.
“It’s depressing and disgusting both at the same time. because it like, it’s sad to look at all your things like, bagged up, even though you had it all organized.” Stoehr said. “and it’s also just disgusting because you can just smell it. It’s so bad.” Fowler said. “That’s it was just really depressing to see, especially since I worked really hard on decorating my room and keeping it organized and everything and I haven’t cried like that, in a while, like, I was scream sobbing.”
