Thousands of dollars' worth of scientific equipment narrowly missed being damaged when a leak was discovered in the Cooper Science Complex Monday morning.
Lynn Sousa, the acting chairman of the chemistry department, said the newly-renovated third floor lab that contains the valuable equipment was found with water-damaged ceiling tiles when staff arrived on Monday. They found the leak coming from a split pipe in a fourth floor lab. The water had pooled on the floor to about an inch and had seeped down to two rooms below, he said.
"Classes went on as normal," Sousa said. "We're real fortunate that [the water] missed the equipment."
Sousa said the fourth floor lab where the leak took place was an organic teaching lab. He said a pipe carrying distilled water to one of the student stations in the lab ruptured.
"Plastic tubing will age over time," he said. "I'm going to ask to have all the piping checked [in the building], and it will be replaced where it needs to be."
Sousa said he did not know how much replacing the pipes would cost.
The other third floor room damaged was a lecture classroom, he said. The equipment in the lab that was nearly damaged were chromatographs, each of which can cost up to $20,000.
Kevin Kenyon, associate vice president for facilities, planning and management, said staff used wet vacs, pumps and mops to clean up the water. The clean up took a couple of hours, he said, and he did not have an estimate for how much the damage totaled.
"There wasn't any major damage," he said. "Little things like this aren't unusual."
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