Though scattered showers and cloudy skies provided a gloomy backdrop yesterday, the weather was a welcome reprieve from Tuesday's barrage of rain and wind that prompted flooding across campus.
As Facilities and Real Estate Services employees work on the damaged sites -- including the lower floors of Speakman and Butcher in the Quadrangle, and the basements of Harrison and Hill college houses -- concerns remain about the ability of Penn's buildings to weather extreme weather.
"There's not enough capacity in the city's drainage system to take such a deluge," Senior Vice President for Facilities Services Omar Blaik said, referring to the lower areas of campus, which are not able to absorb the water produced by storms similar to Tuesday's.
Blaik maintained that Philadelphia's drainage infrastructure is the reason behind incidents such as Speakman's sewage flood.
"Because [Philadelphia] is a very old city, it combines the sewage and drainage together in one pipe," Blaik said, adding that other cities "have made major investments into their utilities" to keep these pipelines separate.
During periods of heavy rain, "water starts building up," which creates a "negative pressure that actually pushes [the mixture of sewage and rainwater] the other way" back up, according to Blaik.
Citing an incident that occurred this past August, which was similar to the recent Speakman situation, Blaik said that Facilities Services is going to install devices called "back-flow preventers" in an effort to solve the problem.
Blaik estimated that the back-flow preventers could be installed within a few months, though the University still must confirm the design and obtain permits from the city in order to do so.
Except for Speakman and Butcher halls' 28 residents -- who Blaik said will probably be able to return to their dormitory by Sunday -- no other students were evicted due to Penn's brief brush with the effects of Hurricane Jeanne.
However, there were approximately 80 calls put into the Facilities hotline to report flooding across campus on Tuesday evening. Workers were kept busy from 7 p.m. until 1 a.m., attempting to remove excess water from various sites.
"They mopped it up and dealt with it," Blaik said of the flooding in Hill, which affected the bottom-floor cafeteria. "I don't think there was significant damage."
The water "was coming in pretty quickly," according to Hill resident and Nursing freshman Chloe Wynne. "It was flowing down the steps under the bridge. There was a whole pool of water out there."
By Wednesday morning, however, the area was almost fully dry, after workers spent hours vacuuming up the moisture.
"At least it wasn't sewage," Wynne added.
Harnwell College House remained sewage-free during the entire Jeanne debacle as well, but could not be classified as dry by any means.
Water flowed under a Harnwell basement door from a deep pool that formed in a lower courtyard as the result of a clogged drain, inundating numerous lounges, music practice rooms and the exercise room.
Vacuums were used to suck up the water, and a large scrubbing machine removed mud and debris from the brick floor. Four humidifiers are still being run in order to dry up any remnants of the flooding.
"When they had the building done, they should have had the bricks sanded," Penn housekeeper Joe Gatling said, after spending eight hours on Wednesday working on the floors. "We can clean it, but we can't make it look new."
Gatling, who has worked in Harrison for nine years, said that rain "never came in like that before" the building was renovated this summer.
A crack in the ceiling -- which is made of solid concrete and appears to be part of the building's foundation, according to housekeeper Michael Malek -- also let in water during the storm, rendering numerous ceiling tiles useless and damaging a panel of soundproof material lining the wall in one of the music practice rooms.
"Water was running down [from the ceiling] like a faucet," Malek said, describing the events of Tuesday night. "They'll have to replace the missing parts" of the ceiling that were ruined.
