Harvard Workers Repair Christmas Flood Damage

Harvard maintenance workers have completed repairs on University buildings that were damaged by several Christmas Day floods, officials said yesterday.

The final stage of the cleanup will allow the last of the University employees displaced by the flood to move back into their offices today, according to a sign posted outside Burr Hall.

Water from burst pipes flooded areas of Burr Hall, Pound Hall and Quincy House last week while students were away for winter break. University employees said they discovered the floods upon returning to work after Christmas.

"We had several problems because of the extremely cold weather and high winds caused pipes in outside walls to freeze," said Thomas E. Vautin, director of facilities management. The flooding caused damage to computers, ceiling tiles and computer equipment, he added.

Although workers in Pound Hall were able to resume work the day after the flood, the History and Literature Department, housed in Burr Hall, was not so lucky. The department has been closed since the flood, but will re-open today.

"The damage was mostly on the second floor and dripped to the first floor," said Marcia Dambry, departmental administrator of History and Literature. "It's mainly our computer room that suffered," she said.

Dambry said she could not yet estimate the cost of the damages to the computers.

Lamentea said it is too early to assess the damage to Pound Hall, but he estimated the repairs would cost between $5000 and $10,000.

"We had a good group of people from the Facilities Maintenance Department who came in on the Holiday weekend to clean up and make repairs [to Burr and Quincy]," Vautin said.

"My office was a mess, but it took just the morning to clear it up," said Ken Lafler, who works in Pound Hall and is office systems coordinator at the Law School.

Denise Buckley, a financial aid counselor at the Law School said that she returned from her vacation to find a steam-filled, and musty smelling office. "We had to be out in the hall for threedays, while they worked on the heat and shampooedthe carpet," she added.

Lamenta said the Building Operations Officeworked together with other divisions of Harvard'scustodial services to make repairs