Rubatex Information

Pea-green dehumidifying blowers, as big as boulders and as loud as idling aircraft, squatted on the fourth and fifth floors of Old Mill in mid-January, working to dry floors and walls soaked after an inadequately insulated sprinkler pipe burst on Jan. 10, causing more than $100,000 in damage to carpeting, ceiling tiles and drywall. A few valiant faculty, braced against the noise, soldiered on preparing for spring classes amidst the roar of fans and the whine of drills.

Although the most severe damage to the building was on its top two floors, some water damage occurred as far down as the second floor. An alarm on the pipe alerted Physical Plant staff after the incident, allowing them to quickly contain the damage. Most of the buldings occupants, despite their unceremonious temporary office evictions, were relatively cheerful in the face of massive inconvenience, in part because the water, which flowed low across the floor, spared most books, computer systems and papers.

That was the mercy of it, says Lisa Schnell, associate professor of English. The water mostly came along the floor rather than from above.

Philip Baruth, an associate professor of English and the veteran of a similar flood four years ago, turned the experiences into a defiant Vermont Public Radio Commentary.

"Insulation is spilling out of the trenches cut in my office walls. My acoustic ceiling is gone, leaving just a deep dark skeleton of metal frames. Water has run down between my window panes and frozen there, obscuring the view completely so that I seem to be sitting in a ruined office frozen in a block of ice. It is something like 40 degrees below zero outside with the windchill," Baruth described the damage in his radio essay. He went on to conclude, "I'm a Vermonter, and I'm not going anywhere, baby."

Ten days after the incident, private contractors and UVM physical plant employees had repaired much of the damage, even resuscitating soaked books through a freeze-drying technique.