By Javier Cabrera / Editor-in-chief
Waterfall (Tanner Summers / Special to Viewpoints)
By Javier Cabrera / Editor-in-chief
Water poured from the third floor of the Martin Luther King Jr. Teaching and Learning Center at Riverside City College on June 21, as a clogged toilet in the men’s restroom flooded the lower floors.
Tanner Summers, a lab aide for Computer Information Systems, in the second floor of the building, said he and others in the lab heard water pouring down the stairs at 3:30 p.m. as they saw the water coming out of the restroom from the upper floor.
Summers said Dave Dant, a support specialist in the lab, ran up the stairs and discovered the toilet had been clogged up.
Summers said Dant then called the college’s facilities maintenance but Summers said the crew did not come fast enough.
“(Maintenance) didn’t come until (one crew member) saw and they all came (running after),” he said.
Before maintenance came, aides at the lab blocked off the area, where the water was dripping, with chairs in the building, Summers said.
Summers, who also works in the Writing and Reading Center at RCC, said he ran down to the first floor of the MLK building to warn James Seals, the support specialist in the writing center, about the leak on the third floor.
After returning back to the second floor to see the progress of the flood, Summers said he went back to the writing center and saw the ceiling was already leaking on top of monitors, keyboards and printers.
Summers said he helped the aides at the writing center to evacuate RCC students from the center, unplug computers and printers and then cover the equipment with plastic covers.
After helping out in the writing center, Summers said he returned back to the second floor of the building and there were fans already running as the maintenance crew started cleaning up the flooded floors.
Summers said the maintenance crew told the aides that the toilet in the men’s restroom was clogged with seat covers.
“(A maintenance worker) told me the censor on the toilet, which detects when to flush, continued to flush, and it did not turn off,” he said.
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Small puddle (Tanner Summers / Special to Viewpoints)
Cover up (Tanner Summers / Special to Viewpoints)