A Flood

Last weekend we had a flood at CityWalk. Not one to rival Noah or anything like that, but an irritating minor setback. A faucet on the bathroom sink in one of the units on the seventh floor burst and the water ran down the building, ruining the drywall in two units on the seventh floor—the pictures are of those units stripped down to the studs so we can put new drywell up—two bathrooms on the sixth floor, an electric bus duct and some other minor damage.

Minor damage, but the total cost will approach $200,000. Fortunately Stinson Plumbing, the faucet manufacturer and their insurance companies are working hard to correct the problem and we won’t be out of pocket for any of that money. It’s awfully good to work with people that do the right thing.

As far as anyone can tell, the faucet was installed correctly, not damaged or even bumped (the failure took place over the weekend when nobody was working in the building—a mixed blessing since that also meant that the water ran until 6:00 a.m. Monday when the first worker came in the building) and simply failed when operating under nine pounds per square inch of water pressure. That’s only one sixth of normal water pressure. We still hadn’t ramped up full water pressure in the building.

The failure was highly unusual, and it made the manufacturer nervous enough that he’s insisted on replacing all the fittings in all 200 units, at his cost, just to make sure we don’t have a repeat.

The biggest loss was the electric bus duct. It’s a made to order item and by working around the clock the factory expects to deliver a replacement to us on November 19. Until that happens we won’t have power in the apartment units, so rather than receiving possession of the first units on November 23, as we expected, we won’t get our first units available for occupancy until December 7, 2009. We still should get a permit to occupy the first three commercial floors (different power system) on the 23rd and when we finally do get apartment units, we should get a lot more—maybe through the 12th or 13th floor.


These aren’t identical to our bus ducts, but it gives you an idea of what they look like. They are a main connector in high powered electrical systems (you can read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_bar). One certain fact about them is that they can’t get wet. Water gets into the insulation and then when you fire them up you have a big problem.

So it wasn’t good news, but it wasn’t a disaster either. By the time I knew about the problem on Monday afternoon, Key Construction, our construction manager, and Stinson Plumbing, our plumbing subcontractor, had already done everything possible to mitigate the problem. Even a flood shouldn’t keep us from opening in December.