“Due to issues with the septic tank, please be advised that the water in Dupre is temporarily shut off. We apologize for the inconvenience and are actively working on repair.”
This email was not the welcome home present that most students were expecting upon their return to campus from fall break.
Rachel Caine, residence life coordinator for Marsh and Carlisle residence halls, was on call when the sewage incident was initially reported from campus safety to residence life on Oct. 22 and reported the update to students, sending the email at 10:33 p.m. to all DuPré residents.
There was reported to have been a “sewer backup” in the basement of DuPré, according to Director of Facilities Bill Littlefield. This sewer backup was caused by a number of foreign objects blocking the lines.
“Paper towels and bath towels do not belong in toilets,” Littlefield said. “DuPré Hall – or any other residence halls for that matter – is not on a septic tank. This was purely caused from improper disposal of paper towels and a cloth bath towel.”
Because of a student’s decision to flush a bath towel, Wofford facilities had to hire an outside contractor to “help clear the lines.”
“The College’s on-call mechanic worked on the problem along with an outside contractor. Crews had to clean out two significant areas of pipe on the ground floor and repair the toilet,” Littlefield said. “While much of the work was finished at around 2:30 a.m., some of the repairs required that the College secure a replacement part first thing the next morning.”
This left several residents on the west and north sides of the dorm without water for approximately 12 hours. This included bathrooms W 2-3, W 2-4, W 2-6, N 2-1, N 2-2, N 2-3, N 1-1, N 1-2 and N 1-3.
Director of Residence Life Kendra Ivins stated that this water outage was not an “extended outage” and therefore did not require any alternative plans for residents.
“The College has plans in place for any extended outage. With the water being out only in limited parts of the building for about 12 hours, these backup plans were not needed to be activated,” Ivins said. “Students had access to other bathrooms within the building.”
Students were sent another email at 10:07 a.m. on Monday, Oct. 23 that addressed which bathrooms were impacted and advised students to use other bathrooms while theirs were without water.
“If the bathroom closest to your room is impacted, please use another restroom in the building for the time being,” Ivins’ email read. “All residents are welcome to use any available restroom.”
Approximately 20 minutes later, at 10:30 a.m., Ivins sent another update that read, “We just received notice that water has been restored throughout the building. You may experience some air or discoloring when the water is first turned on. Please let facilities know, via a maintenance request, if you have any further issues. Thank you for your patience, and we hope you have a wonderful Monday!”
Ivins explained that the response to this incident followed their general emergency facilities response of residence life and campus safety working together to contact the emergency facilities staff. Residence life then communicates with students and helps to “mitigate damage” when student spaces are involved.
Ivins encourages students to contact the RLC on-call or Campus safety with any concerns or issues that they find in their residence halls.
