Building’s Drain System Fixed After Storm Damage

The damages to the new building’s drain system caused by heavy rain in November were finally fixed by upgrading the capacity of the drains.

After the drains clogging up and the first floor of the new building flooding because of unexpected amounts of rainwater, the construction team had to ensure that this problem never happened again so that the new library didn’t have unnecessary damages.

“The solution was to increase the capacity of the drains from tubes of 4 inches to tubes of 6 inches and from 2 drains to 6 drains, so now the capacity is higher so it guarantees that it won’t happen again in the future,” Andres Montoya said.

These damages were caused by huge amounts of rainwater and hail that the drain system failed to contain and all of the ice blocking the drains causing the water to overflow and flood the floor of the building

“This happened in the Thanksgiving week, because there was a very strong rain with hail, so blocks of ice caused by this storm blocked the drains,” Andres said.

The drains failed to evacuate the water because the construction team didn’t expect them to have to contain such large amount of water and ice at the same time, so the drains were not designed to hold the amount of water that it received.

“The water overflowed because the drains were very narrow and they were not capable of holding all of the water that fell, the floor got flooded, but luckily the building was empty so there weren’t any major damages,” Andres said.

Even Though the damages were caused on the Thanksgiving week in November, the construction team are just finishing to fix the damages by the end of February because of some delays in supplies.

“We worked on the damages for about 15 days, but we are still waiting on some supplies for the drains to arrive like some filters and covers so we can finish fixing them, but other than that, it is ready,” Andres said.

Because the new library is going to be in this building, there couldn’t be any risk of similar damages happening again in the future because that would have been an even bigger problem, so the building team had to make sure that the new drain system could resist any amount of rain and hail without any problem.

“If it rained again as hard as it did, the building would have flooded again and it could have been a big problem when the library was ready because it would have caused more serious damages, so we had to ensure it never happened again,” Elquin Montoya said.