Park-Stradley dorm flooding links, details
Two weeks ago last Sunday (has it really been so long?), I got a tip from an OSU student that Taylor Tower on North Campus was losing water pressure, that students were being sent to the RPAC to get drinking water and showers. The office assistants at the front desk of Taylor said it was a water main break somewhere on South Campus. Editors said "go" and I went.
Students were evacuated from South Campus dorms Sunday night after a water main break flooded the basement of Park-Stradley Hall.
“Right before this happened, we were looking at Park-Stradley, and all the lights went out. There was a really loud, kinda like a hum, and then everything came back on, then the sirens just started,” said Tom McKinney, a chemical engineering major living in Baker West.
Park-Stradley Hall, Baker Hall East and West, and the Ohio Union were evacuated as a result of the breakage.
The first story was researched and written in under three hours, with some additional reporting from Andrew Holleran, who got the quote from Undergraduate Student Government president Taylor Stepp, and Kristen Mitchell, who got the email from Jim Lynch. It was a wild night, and got me my first front page story.
The second story took longer to research and was rather harder to do, since I had to very casually walk around the RPAC and gently bother half-awake students. One hall director who had slept the night in the RPAC asked me to leave the room he was administering. It's very hard to get quotes from any employee at OSU that isn't a spokesman, but that's to be expected. It ran above the fold on the front page.
Other students wrote follow-up stories:
- Baker Halls open, Park-Stradley still 'inaccessible'
- Most stranded Ohio State students find refuge off campus, home
- Building inspectors to visit Park-Stradley Wednesday
- Park-Stradley residents allowed back into dorm
- Ohio State students return to Park-Stradley, sans drinking water, AC
- RPAC ‘good location’ for Ohio State evacuation plan
- Drinkable, hot water returns to Park-Stradley
- Cause of Ohio State water main break remains a mystery