Water Leak Damages Four Floors of Offices

A broken water pipe on the seventh floor of the building housing the California First Bank in Santa Ana caused an estimated $1 million damage Friday on at least four floors, collapsing ceiling tiles, flooding carpets and damaging office equipment.

Jean Moriarty, general manager of the building at 1055 N. Main St., said a narrow pipe under a kitchen sink broke during the night and caused extensive flooding all the way to the fourth floor.

Santa Ana Fire Department dispatcher Stephen Raphael estimated the damage at $1 million, although the damage to computers and other office equipment is still unknown. The first-floor bank wasn’t flooded, but many of the offices above it had to be abandoned.

Jim Kenan, chief deputy director of the Orange County Transportation Commission on the fifth floor, found the damage when he arrived for work.

“We could be looking at $150,000 to $200,000 worth of damage,” Kenan said. “Some of our computers were literally sitting in water.”

Although Kenan and firefighters laid tarps over soaked floors and desks in offices where water had destroyed ceiling tiles and dripped through, most of the word processing equipment and papers on the desks were already soaked.

“Our office generates paper; this is the ultimate disaster for us,” Kenan said.

On the sixth floor, in the offices of the Orange County Social Services Agency, water dripped on six computers, file cabinets, desks and other furnishings, said Bob Griffith, chief deputy of the agency.

Griffith said the cost to the county could be “tens of thousands of dollars.”

“It is hard to put a dollar amount on the paper work that is unusable,” Griffith said.

The Santa Ana Fire Department received the call about flooding in the 11-story building, officially named Segerstrom Center, at 7:18 a.m. Thirty firefighters went to the scene.

Moriarty posted notices by the elevators advising people not to go to the fifth through seventh floors for about three hours.

He estimated that fixing the ceiling tiles and drying and cleaning the carpet in the building would cost $25,000.

“We made it through the earthquake, and now we have water,” Moriarty said. “It’s a concrete building, which is safe, but it has little cracks for the water to drip through.”