On Monday, November 13, 2023, around noon, one of the main water system entries into Elgin Community College malfunctioned and caused multiple fire alarms to set off in Building B. 

According to Senior Director of Facilities in Operations and Maintenance Patrick Dolan, the malfunction in the water system contributed to a build-up of minerals in the double-check valve, which is a piece of machinery that acts as a protective system that prevents contamination in the water service. 

“One of our engineers walked into our bowler room and the double-check valve’s safety relief [had] water gushing out of it,” Dolan said. “….The device that would maintain pressure [in the water system] became compacted with minerals, like iron.”

Dolan and his team began to think of the possibility of the bowler room flooding, which, according to him, would have caused bigger problems on that day. They shut off the system and realized that it cut the water supply into the many buildings that rely on that internal system. 

“What we didn’t anticipate was that… the water spilling out was going to cause the water to recede inside the pipes to the point where the fire alarm system, which also has a safety system, wouldn’t detect water and trigger,” Dolan said. “….It was expected if you thought the whole thing through, but part of the difficulty was that the fire alarm system going off was as much an emergency as the water spilling in the basement.”

According to Emergency Management Specialist Stephan J. Stassen, the first fire alarm went off around noon in conjunction with when one of the main entries into Building B “broke.”

“The fire alarm went off because [it] was then triggered when the water pressure up in the third floor finally dropped for it to trigger the alarm,” Stassen said. 

According to Dolan, it took the fire department about 15-20 minutes to assess the situation; after realizing there was no fire, they finally deactivated the alarms.

“In that interim time [of the fire alarm going off], a good substantial amount of people evacuated,” Dolan said. “It was quiet for a little but then [the fire alarm] went off a second time and that caused a lot of confusion for our students and our staff.”

According to Dolan, the reason why multiple alarms went off was because of the slow depletion of water in the pipes after the water was shut off, which started on the third floor of Building B. Once the water in the system on the third floor began to get low, the first alarm was triggered and the same thing followed suit on the second floor.

“Then once we got the all-clear from the fire department and the police department and realized there was no danger to anybody, we proceeded to fix the problems in the basement.” 

During this time, engineers tore apart the double-check valve, found the source of the problem, chiseled out the mineral debris, cleaned it out with a file, reconstructed everything and the water was back on a little more than an hour after the issue was first addressed.