Broken Sprinkler Floods Conant Lab

A basement lab in the Conant Laboratory building was flooded with water two feet deep when a fire sprinkler froze and burst Monday morning.

The lab damaged was part of Harvard's Nuclear Magnetic Resonance laboratory, which allow synthetic chemists to observe the behavior of nuclei within molecules. The lab is currently closed and expected to be re-open within a few days, according to Shaw Huang, managing director of the laboratory.

It is still unclear how much damage had been done to the equipment in the lab, Huang said.

The initial building alarm brought a Cambridge Fire Department truck and two Harvard University Police Department (HUPD) cars about 12:20 p.m, according to one officer. Once the problem was discovered, workers pumped the water out of the lab.

The room, which is about 10 feet by

10 feet, was covered with enough water to submerge some equipment.