Several businesses in Kingston are cleaning up after a downpour on Wednesday that overloaded municipal water and sewer systems.
Luce Hair Studio’s owner Steve Wallace now has a salon filled with mops, buckets and a shop vac.
Wallace says his employees called him to his downtown location shortly after 4 p.m. when the rain was at its worst.
When he arrived, Wallace was stunned by what he saw, water gushing out of the toilet and bathroom sink.
“All the way to our clean-up sinks and it was coming through our washing machine as well. It was like a fountain.”
Wallace closed up shop for the day on Thursday to deal with the water.
Fortunately, he has insurance to cover the cost, about $6,000, to replace the floor of his 1,100-square-foot business.
What it will cost to address flooding damage at Queen’s University is less clear.
Dan Langham, the director of environmental health and safety at Queen’s University, says roughly half a dozen buildings on campus experienced varying degrees of flooding.
“The damage at this point seems to be quite minimal. We haven’t had any locations where we have significant concerns.”
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The worst flooding took place on the lower floor of the John Deutsch University Centre.
The lower floor is below street level and water ran down outside stairs and directly into the building.
The university’s Alma Mater Society is located on that floor.
President Miguel Martinez says staff immediately began trying to save documents and computers as water came rushing in.
Martinez says they were on the phone with the fire department when water started coming out of electrical rooms and sockets in the wall.
He says that’s when they followed the advice of the fire department and pulled the fire alarm to evacuate the building.
“At any moment, a spark could go off and fry anyone within the area or cause a fire or any potential kind of situation in that kind of circumstance, so our priority at that time was to evacuate the building and keep everyone safe.”
Langham says drying out the affected areas will take at least another day or two but shouldn’t have any impact on the start of the school year.
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