Barker Center Recovers After Flood

The Barker Center should be up and running smoothly by the time classes resume on Monday, despite the major flood that soaked through one wing of the building this summer.

On the evening of Saturday, July 9, a chilled water pipe broke in the building’s attic, releasing hundreds of gallons of water down the walls of the building’s atrium, into the offices of the African and African American Studies department, and eventually reaching all the way down to the basement.

Walls, ceilings, and carpeting were soaked throughout Barker’s southeast corner, bordered by Prescott and Harvard Street.

The water, which immediately set off the fire alarm, found its way into lighting fixtures and electrical equipment.

Michael N. Lichten, assistant dean for Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) physical resources and a leader of the restoration efforts, said that while FAS buildings had suffered from weather-induced leaks in the past, he didn’t “remember anything anywhere near this extensive.”

Barker Center Superintendent Maureen McCarthy was one of the building’s few occupants at the time of the artificial downpour and returned to the premises over the following few days to lead the team of emergency control professionals.

The team’s first task was to shut off the valve to stop the flow of gushing water, explained Lichten.

“The water line is under pressure so it was not an easy job,” McCarthy said.

No one interviewed by The Crimson knew of anything valuable that had been destroyed in the flood.

“Although it was very unlucky [for the flood] to have happened, we were lucky that the building’s contents weren’t more damaged than they were,” said Lichten.

No computers were affected, said Lichten, and only 40 to 50 books were destroyed—“a good number, considering we have hundreds and hundreds,” McCarthy said.

But McCarthy warned that “not all residents have come back yet and there is potential there for some problems.”

Because the water travelled through the building’s center, it did not immediately enter any offices—which are mainly located on the periphery—but slowly seeped through their ceilings and floors from the outside.

“You could see water moving along the ceiling as these bulges would develop,” recalled Karen C. C. Dalton, the assistant director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, who arrived at the scene the day after the flood to help rescue her department’s art collection.

The Fogg Museum staff quickly removed the large portraits from the centrally located Thompson Room, according to Sandra K. Grindlay, curator of Harvard’s portrait collection, who was overseeing their reinstallation yesterday morning.

Grindlay reported that the portraits only showed some evidence of moisture here and there.

Some artwork in the African and African American studies department was more damaged, however, and is still being restored by the Fogg, according to department administrator Giselle Jackson.

Building restoration began immediately after the leak had been sealed. Water was pumped out and hot air pumped in through yellow tubes attached to drying machines in the Barker parking lot, which raised ground floor temperatures to 108 degrees for a week or so, according to Parimal G. Patil, assistant professor of the study of religion.

“We had to open up walls to make sure the wall cavity was dry,” Lichten said. “Once it was completely dried we had to put it back together—that was a long process.”

Carpeting also needed to be replaced and walls repainted in sections of the eastern wing.

But construction has been completed sooner than expected, Grindlay said.

Jackson said the African and African American Studies department is 80 percent back to normal. “The crew has worked really hard to get it up and running before the 19th when students walk through those doors,” she said.

While most students and staff will be unaffected by the Barker Center flood, for those that did experience it, the flood has changed their perspective on the more serious flooding caused in the Gulf Coast by Hurricane Katrina.

“It gives me an appreciation of how difficult it is to dry out a building,” said Lichten, “and this was just a single section of a single building.”

“It was very peculiar and unsettling to watch something that you always experienced as being stable, something you could count on, fall apart like that,” Dalton said.

—Staff writer Nina L. Vizcarrondo can be reached at nvizcarr@fas.harvard.edu.