The sixth floor lounge of Syracuse University’s Booth Hall was flooded Sunday when a janitor accidentally hit a fire sprinkler with a garbage bag, setting it off and resulting in two damaged dorm rooms, said Charlie Pare, an SU FixIt employee.

After hitting the sprinkler at about 1:15 p.m., janitor Craig Hadfield started backing up and muttered to himself, ‘It’s going to go off,’ said Elsa Buss, a sixth-floor resident who saw it happen. Buss is a freshman public relations and policy studies major and former Daily Orange contributing writer.

‘It was an accident,’ Hadfield said, who was helping clean up the water.

A triple, room 628, and a two-person suite, room 627, were affected by the water.

The triple was affected most since it is connected to the lounge. A handful of belongings, including clothes, a printer, camera equipment, textbooks and papers, were soaked by the water, said Ben Foster, one of the triple’s residents and a freshman aerospace engineering and political science major.

Foster, who was in his room at the time of the accident, said when he heard a strange sound he thought it was the elevator. But when he and his roommates exited the room, he saw the lounge was filling rapidly with water.

‘We’ve been wading through water for the better part of the early afternoon,’ Foster said.

Travis Mason, former Student Association president and a resident of the two-person suite, said there was not a lot of damage to his room and would not comment further.

Buss said when she saw the sprinkler get hit, she knew something bad was going to happen.

‘I ran to my room and grabbed my sunglasses,’ Buss said. ‘When I came back into the hallway, I saw what looked like smoke filling the lounge, but I realized it was water.’

The fire alarms went off shortly after, and all residents were ordered to leave the building, Buss said.

‘We saw what we thought was smoke,’ said Jenny Sutton, a freshman economics major and another sixth-floor resident, after returning to her room. ‘We didn’t really know what was going on.’

The displaced residents gathered across the street from Booth Hall for about a half hour. Some still wore their pajamas; many were confused as to what had happened and were worried about their belongings inside their dorm rooms.

Others expressed annoyance at having to leave the building.

Bevin Fath, a sophomore advertising major and a third-floor resident, said she had been working on papers that she needed to e-mail to a professor.

‘I was reluctant to go outside because I thought it was a drill,’ Fath said. ‘Now the (resident adviser) is telling me I can’t go inside for a while. So now, I wish I would have stayed in the building.’

Shortly before 2 p.m., the residents were told by Pete Califano, a sixth-floor RA, they would be allowed to reenter the building. He said they would have to use the loading dock stairwell since the elevators had been shut down for safety concerns.

While people returned to their rooms complaining of a foul smell, FixIt employees used a flood pump to get rid of the water in the lounge and two dorm rooms.

Public Safety officials told Foster and his roommates to make an inventory of the damage, Foster said. For now, they know nothing more than that.

‘They have been extremely helpful, as helpful as they can be when your room is full of water,’ Foster said.

Foster said he was surprised when he found out the accident hadn’t been caused by a student.

‘It kind of sucks, but (our room) needed to be cleaned anyway,’ he said. ‘I had to do a lot of laundry so now I have to do it.’

Published on April 30, 2006 at 12:00 pm