The Edgewood City Building suffered massive damage last week after a problem with the building’s fire suppression system led to pipes bursting.
Although the flooding was eventually curtailed, the building suffered damage to its computer infrastructure, ceilings, firefighter living quarters, an area near the council chambers and several administrative sections of the building.
Both Mayor John Link and City Administrator Brian Dehner expect the damage incurred to be easily in the six figures. The city plans to begin doing official assessments on the damage later this week.
“It’s like a war zone,” Link said. “It’s devastating.”
Dehner said the problems began around 6 a.m. last Tuesday. He attributed the triggering of the burst to a pinhole leak, which is exactly what it sounds like, in the suppression system. Link attested that pinhole leaks had occurred in the building’s pipe infrastructure in the past.
The suppression system, Dehner said, is usually filled with air. But the leak triggered a drop in air pressure, which the system read as a fire. The system then began filling with water, but “the pressure of the water blew three other spots in the building,” Dehner said. “It blew holes in the pipe, and the water just started rushing out into the building.”
A firefighter just happened to be in the building when the leak began and witnessed water gushing out of the ceiling. It took about half an hour to figure out how to shut off water to the building, by which time about two inches of water had gathered in the building’s administrative area.
“The ceiling tiles just completely collapsed,” Link said.
“It took out the phone system, the door lock system,” Dehner said. “The servers were flooded.”
The building’s server has an automatic system that backs up the city’s data every four hours, and Dehner said that the data stored in the damaged server has since been recovered. Older paper records in the building may have been damaged, but this still needs to be assessed.
The old server itself is likely too waterlogged to be repairable. The building’s fiber optic cables were also damaged. Dehner said crews will likely begin repairing those later this week.
ServPro, a national specialty cleaning company, was called in to handle the cleanup. They brought in dryers and dehumidifiers to extract the water, but it will likely take two to three months to completely repair the damage, Dehner said.
Link informed other Kenton County mayors of the damage at the Saturday meeting of the Kenton County Mayors Group. He said the city will likely seek stainless steel pipes, instead of galvanized steel pipes, for any future work in the building. He encouraged the other mayors to consider spending a little more money on infrastructure if it meant avoiding what happened in Edgewood.
“I would say go to the stronger pipes … and the non-corrosive standpoint of the stainless steel,” said Link.
The city has insurance through the Kentucky League of Cities and is actively submitting claims.
“My guess is they’ll stand by it and do everything they can for it,” Dehner said.
The building has reopened to the public, but repair work is ongoing. Residents can also still contact the city at (859)331-5910, but city staff members ask residents for patience as their technical capacities are limited due to the damage.
