Delta State University’s Delta Music Institute continues to recover following serious flooding in the DMI\u2019s Whitfield Building on Nov. 30.<\/p>\n
Steven McClellan, Vice President for Finance and Administration and Chief Financial Officer at Delta State, said the cause of the water damage was a ruptured old chilled water line that serviced an air handler on the east side of Whitfield.<\/p>\n
This line was on top of a rooftop air handler located directly above the DMI offices.\u00a0 Since it ruptured above the air handler, instead of dripping directly down from one floor to the next, the water was somewhat blown through the air ducts throughout most of the area.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe total dollar amount of damage to university and personal property is unknown at this time and will not be known until everything dries,\u201d said McClellan. \u201cAt that time we can measure the permanent damage to items like office equipment, desks, carpets, walls, hardwood floors, as well as guitars and other personal collections.\u201d<\/p>\n
President William N. LaForge, who was on site Friday along with First Lady Nancy LaForge to help with cleanup efforts, said arriving on scene was shocking.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe water damage to the front of the DMI building is terrible. Files, equipment, furniture, carpeting, books \u2014 nearly everything in the front offices of DMI \u2014 were effected,\u201d said LaForge.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome items are salvageable and some are not.\u00a0Fortunately none of the main area of the DMI, including the studios, was flooded,\u201d added LaForge. \u201cI commend our DMI professionals for their resilience and good spirit in dealing with the \u2018DMI Flood of 2013,\u2019 and I salute our Facilities Management professionals for their quick and effective work in responding to the crisis.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe staff in Facility Maintenance do a great job keeping our mechanical systems working to the best of their ability considering the inadequate funding we have available,\u201d said McClellan. \u201cThis requires taking a pretty exhaustive list of deferred maintenance items and making an educated guess at which are the most likely to provide the most problems and address those that we can with available funding.\u201d<\/p>\n
Delta State has a plan coordinated with DMI Director Tricia Walker to develop short and long term solutions when reassessment of the damage is completed this week.<\/p>\n
\u201cResolving this goes way beyond the situation at DMI and includes finding ongoing and adequate funding to maintain all of our facilities in a responsible manner,\u201d he added. \u201cThe incident at DMI is just one of many such situations waiting to happen on our campus. We will work with state officials and members of the Legislature after the new year to try and identify a funding mechanism for these types of ‘Repair and Renovation’ needs.\u201d<\/p>\n
While recovery will take some time, Walker said she\u2019s remaining as positive as possible and the semester\u2019s last week of classes are going on as scheduled, just in makeshift environments.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re sad to lose some items, but there are many things to be thankful for,\u201d said Walker. \u201cI would like to thank the Delta State Facilities Management crew for their hard work and the Office of Information Technology for their innovation in getting us through these first few days.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have lots of work ahead and we’ll be taking it one day at a time.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Delta State University’s Delta Music Institute continues to recover following serious flooding in the DMI\u2019s Whitfield Building on Nov. 30. Steven McClellan, Vice President for Finance and Administration and Chief…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":144,"featured_media":58004,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[1416,258],"class_list":["post-58002","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-delta-music-institute","tag-delta-music-institute","tag-flood"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.deltastate.edu\/news-and-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58002","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.deltastate.edu\/news-and-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.deltastate.edu\/news-and-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.deltastate.edu\/news-and-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/144"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.deltastate.edu\/news-and-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58002"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.deltastate.edu\/news-and-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58002\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58006,"href":"https:\/\/www.deltastate.edu\/news-and-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58002\/revisions\/58006"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.deltastate.edu\/news-and-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58004"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.deltastate.edu\/news-and-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.deltastate.edu\/news-and-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.deltastate.edu\/news-and-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}