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City Beat
Broken pipe floods part of WG High, closing one classroom
Registrar's office also needed a few days of mop-up
By Kate Carter
One Willow Glen High School classroom and the registrar's office were flooded by about a half-inch of water when poorly capped pipes in the ceiling leaked on Jan. 29.
About 30 students and a handful of administrators were forced to move to a different classroom and office, Principal Pat Day said. By early last week everyone was back in place, but, "it was definitely a big inconvenience," he said.
The water lines are connected to a boiler in the school's old heating system that is gradually being phased out of the school facility, said Ty Williams, facilities administrator for the San Jose Unified School District.
The boiler had been under repair, Day said, and classrooms and offices in the Q wing that are still on the old system had not been getting heat for about a week.
During the repair, water to the pipes had been turned off and some of the lines had been capped. However, the contractor doing the work failed to completely seal the end of some pipes, district officials said. When the boiler was reactivated and water turned back on after school ended on Jan. 29, water leaked out of the pipes and collected above the ceiling tiles in the school's N wing, Williams said.
The water finally saturated some of the tiles and poured down into the rooms. Staff in the registrar's office in the construction crew noticed the leak and turned off the water five minutes after the leak began, he said.
"You know what it's like when a glass of water spills," Day said. "This was much bigger than just a glass of water."
The registrar's office and the Willow Glen Plus classroom were the most damaged. Two other classrooms in the wing sustained minimal to no damage and were kept open, Williams said.
The contractor will pay for the damage and cleanup that included stripping the floors, replacing some ceiling tiles and cleaning up the mess left behind by the dirty, rusty water, Williams said.
District officials would not give the contractor company's name, citing that it would complicate their negotiations on the extent of the company's liability.
The boiler is 50 years old, Day said, and has had a lot of problems. It will be removed by the end of the summer and the new heating system will service the entire school, he said.
But changing classrooms and office space is a regular occurrence at the school that has been undergoing extensive renovation throughout the school year, he said. The major construction is scheduled to be completed before school resumes in the fall. Meanwhile, students and staff continue to put up with the challenges of learning in a construction zone. Day said the school improvements are worth the extra time, effort and patience.
"If we weren't doing this, I don't know what we'd be doing," he said. "We continue to run a good academic program."
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Willow Glen, California Since 1992
