I got to my office early this morning, ready to get a jump on my work day. As I approached the door, I saw that the carpet in the hallway was wet, as though water was coming from behind the wall. I happened to know that behind the wall in that spot was the sink in our breakroom. So, I had a pretty good idea of what I would see when I opened the door.

There was standing water over most of the breakroom -- close to a centimeter deep. It had spread into the cube area. There were three cubes where computers were sitting in water. My cube had a damp spot in the carpet, but my computer was still dry. I had to slosh through the water to get there, though.

The building maintenance guy had noticed the leak, come in, and shut off the water already. I managed to get the computers shut down, and I unplugged everything from the wall. Within an hour, there was a crew here with vaccuum devices, and they got right to work. I was fairly impressed with them, actually. They clearly had experience with this sort of situation, and they had the right equipment for the job. They cleared up the standing water within a half an hour.

Of course, the carpets were (and are) still wet. They brought in floor fans and dehumidifiers. As I write this, I have a fan in my cube blowing under my desk, and there is another fan just outside my cube blowing into the hall. There is a dehumidifier (industrial grade, between the size of a dishwasher and a washing machine) chugging away in the next cube. The crew is still here, working on the carpet and the drywall.

My coworkers whose computers were in the water have temporarily moved. (Fortunately, we have cubes for them to move to.) I have not moved, mainly because I have a fair amount of infrastructure (network connections, embedded devices) set up in my cube that I depend on. However, it's something of a challenge to work with a loud fan three feet from my chair. To make things worse, I hear that the dehumidifiers are going to be putting out a lot of heat, so I have that to look forward to. (I suppose I might be glad for the fan at that point.)

The cause of all of this was a water pump that we had installed under our sink. We wanted to put in a water filtration system, but we found that we didn't have enough water pressure to run it. So, we added the pump to drive the filter. It was working great until the hose on the pump blew off. I don't know if it was faulty installation or just a poor design, but apparently it couldn't handle the pressure that the pump generated. Of course, it happened overnight, so there was no one here to catch it.

It could have been worse, though. We have a holiday weekend coming up. If it had happened early in the weekend, we might have been looking at a truly terrible situation. Also, the office below us had some flooding as well (not sure how bad -- I have heard conflicting reports). Given more time, they would also have been much worse off than they are.

As for me, I'm going to try to get back to work. It's nice to have a paying job, even if it gets a little damp on occasion.