Over Thanksgiving break, a broken component in an HVAC system sent boiling water and steam into several classrooms in Forbush Hall. In the days that followed, a Friends maintenance crew worked hard to repair the damage.
Assistant Facilities Director Yusuf Rasheed was the person who discovered the flood. On Friday, he walked by English teacher Mary Wiltenburg’s classroom and immediately noticed something was wrong.
“It was hot, lots of steam, like a sauna,” Mr. Rasheed told the Quaker Quill.
Rasheed estimates that half an inch of water covered the floor in the Senior Hall. Maintenance crews had to wade through it to begin cleanup. What had begun as a relaxing Thanksgiving break turned into a weeklong clean-up operation that affected both the lower and upper floors of the Forbush building.
“We shut the water off immediately and then went into cleanup mode,” said Rasheed. “We had two big contractors come out. They brought in over twenty guys and started the cleanup process, sucking up the water, cutting open walls, and letting it all ventilate.”
The water came from one of the building’s HVAC systems, that sat behind a couch in Ms. Wiltenburg’s room, Forbush 246. The malfunctioning unit flooded Wiltenburg’s room and English teacher Rob Travieso’s room 245 next door, making them largely unusable for multiple days after students and staff returned to school.
Mr. Trav said this isn’t the first time this had happened.
“My reaction was some version of ‘Here we go again,’ ” said Trav. “Two years ago, they had to replace all the carpet because it flooded.”
Though the previous flood, in December 2022, was the result of a burst water pipe in the ceiling of a second-floor room, the damaged area was similar. An email from then-Upper School Head Jon Garman detailed the scope.
“[O]n the second floor: rooms 249 [Helen Berkeley] and 247 [Joshua Ratner] had minimal damage, 246, 245 and Senior Hall had some damage, and 244 [Mike Paulson] took a pretty good hit,” Mr. Garman wrote. “[On] the first floor: 162 [Ben Roach] took a big hit, 163 [Erin Hall] and the Mac Lab had some damage.”
So this time, teachers on the upper floors immediately worried about those on the lower.
“I thought about the people below me who have all this nice stuff, like Mr. Roach and Ms. Hall. They have computers and artwork and stuff like that,” remarked Trav.
Trav and Wiltenburg’s rooms had to have the bottom portions of their walls cut out and replaced. But sure enough, the rooms that had it even worse were the art classrooms downstairs.
“The stuff in Mr. Roach’s room got hit the hardest,” Upper School Principal Brandon Rogers told us. “The projector doesn’t work, the outlets don’t work, and we have to replace the tables.”
When he heard about the flood, Upper School art teachers Ben Roach came in right away on Saturday.
“It looked pretty bad,” he remembers. “There were eight to 14 guys working all over the place, taking stuff out by the bagful.”
Quill reporters were sitting at the first row of tables in Mr. Roach’s classroom to interview him. He pointed to our seats.
“Everything from where you guys are sitting, up to the front of the room here, that’s what got drenched,” he said.
Then, he pointed towards cabinets that looked like they were covered in dried mud. It turns out, that was from the ceiling tiles that melted and fell down.
“You can see this debris here, from [the tiles] falling and crumbling and then splattering back up onto the cabinets,” he said.
Not only had the classroom itself been damaged, but a lot of valuable things had to be thrown away.
“We lost a projector,” Roach told us. “$300, $200 books. How do we even get those back?”
Most of the tables in the room were destroyed by the flood, too. Since the wood was composite, the tables soaked up the steam and were warped beyond repair. During our interview, they were waiting outside the room to be hauled away.
“You can go out and look at the ones out there, expanded by two, three inches,” he said. “They warp, and the top cracks, and you just can’t even do anything with it.”
According to Renee Hall, another art teacher with a classroom and office downstairs in Forbush, a lot of student art was lost in the flood. Some pieces were too water-damaged to be recovered. Others were missing after the cleanup was over. Even Roach’s own art and a high school yearbook he kept on his desk were damaged by the flood.
Despite the materials lost and the hectic changing of classrooms, teachers have been staying positive. Trav said that, while not being able to teach in his normal classroom was inconvenient, going to classrooms he wouldn’t usually teach in has been interesting.
“I think it’s been fun going to different rooms,” he said.
Josh Carlin, history teacher and senior grade dean, also had to switch classrooms temporarily.
“It’s kind of annoying,” he admitted, “but another day will be fine.”
