EWU senior Nikko Bowers was in Cheney Hall with a couple classmates on May 16 when he saw water coming in under the engineering room door from the hallway.

Five to 10 minutes later, when it started raining harder, he noticed more water running under the door.

“I looked out there and there was water spewing out of the floor through a crack in the middle of the hallway,” Bowers told The Easterner. “(Water) was going under all the doors in the immediate area into about four different classrooms. And then the main hallway, there was a long crack in the middle of the tile, and that’s where water was spraying out of the floor like a fountain. It was only doing it when it rained really hard.”

Though the building wasn’t evacuated, Bowers said that maintenance staff arrived after a few minutes and began “sucking up the water and drying up the floors.”

Craig Opsal, the director of facilities maintenance, told The Easterner in a phone interview that the leak was caused by a crack in a pipe that runs from the roof to the storm drains.

“(The roof) water runs to the storm drains,” Opsal said. “That pipe, as it comes down from the drains on the roof and it travels under certain parts of the floor in the building, is cracked.”

Opsal said that the pipe repair is “being worked into a project right now” and will likely require a capital request, however the timeline is currently unknown.

“I don’t know where that’s at time wise, but I have a feeling that it’s fairly high in the priority,” Opsal said.

Opsal said that the custodial staff deals with the clean up when something like this occurs.

“If we had a day like we had (of rain), it may very well that we would see that water again,” Opsal said. “It would depend on how large a quantity of water.”