Broken Water Main Dampens Hotel’s Party Plans
A little before 6 o’clock Tuesday evening, Hal Barker--a stocky man, roughly the size of a blitzing linebacker--felt himself rising off the ground. Thinking this unusual, Barker stared at his shoes.
They were under water.
“All of a sudden, water was just shooting between my legs,” said Barker, maintenance engineer at the Hotel San Diego, which is located on Broadway between Union and State streets.
At the time, Barker was standing on the floor of the hotel’s basement, which was soon flooded with what was later estimated to be 1 million gallons of water. Water was standing a foot deep in some places.
A city water main on State Street had burst. Cold weather was pegged as the villain. And a renovated, landmark hotel was the victim.
Western Sun Hotels recently spent $2.3 million renovating the hotel, which has in its history welcomed Gloria Swanson, Mary Pickford, Cecil B. DeMille, Liberace and Albert Einstein as guests.
Leonard W. Glass, a former plastic surgeon, is president of Western Sun Hotels, and his aim in giving the hotel a complete face lift was to make it competitive by offering a low-cost alternative to the larger, pricier hotels downtown.
Immediate Problems
Glass said the average cost for a room at the Hotel San Diego was $45 to $60 a night, while they are more than double at some of the larger hotels--the Omni, the U.S. Grant and the San Diego Marriott, just a few water mains away.
On Thursday, however, there were more immediate problems, and Glass gazed with glazed eyes at the piles of damaged carpet that lay rolled and stacked on the floor of the hotel’s Continental Room.
“It’s a nightmare, just a nightmare,” moaned Glass.
A New Year’s Eve party scheduled for the Continental had to be moved upstairs, which forced the cancellation of another, potentially more lucrative party in the main ballroom.
“Narcotics Anonymous had contracted with us to have its party down here, in the Continental Room,” Glass said. “The hotel was selling special New Year’s Eve packages for the party upstairs, which would have made a lot of money. But, we have a commitment to Narcotics Anonymous, and we have to honor it. Now, their party is upstairs, and the other party, well . . . it’ll just have to wait until next year.”
Glass said the hotel’s supply of reserve dry goods--linens and towels for 225 rooms, housing 400 guests--was ruined.
Also ruined, in his words, was “everything in the basement . . . the floors of the meeting rooms, housekeeping supplies, laundry equipment. We had a complete commercial laundry down here. Now we’re having to send out for it.”
A dollar figure for damage has yet to be assessed, but even to the naked eye, the damage looks extensive.
City Officials Evasive
“I’d call it in the hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Glass said. “We’ll know more in a couple of weeks.”
Glass insists that the city of San Diego is liable for the accident, since it was its water main that ruptured and triggered the flooding.
City officials were not so quick to endorse that position on Thursday.
Daryl Grigsby, acting deputy director of the city’s water utilities systems division, was asked if the city agreed that it was liable.
“That I couldn’t answer,” Grigsby said. “The Risk Management Department will take care of that. Once the hotel files a claim against the city, we’ll look at the whole thing, to see if we were liable, or if some problem exists with the structure of the hotel.
“As you know, that’s a very old hotel,” said Grigsby. “So I can’t really answer one way or the other.”
Grigsby said the first report of a broken main came in at 5:45 p.m. Tuesday, and his people had the main fixed and water service restored by 6:45 a.m. Wednesday.
“It was a 12-inch, cast-iron main that broke,” he said. “When cold weather hits, you never know what’s going to happen. When things contract and expand, you get so much fatigue on the metal that you actually get a break. Cold causes these things.”
Glass called the flooding “depressing,” since remodeling efforts had, in his words, “ finally showed signs of being completed,” after having gone on almost non-stop since before the deluge.
Reservations Canceled
Despite the fact that none of the hotel’s rooms were affected, Glass said dozens of reservations were canceled by guests who had read about the flooding. He said the only inconvenience to guests was that the elevators were turned off for less than 24 hours. He said it meant that the Oba Oba dance troupe from Brazil was forced to hike six floors upstairs after dancing all night.
Glass expected a sold-out house because of tonight’s Holiday Bowl football game--featuring teams from Oklahoma and Wyoming--and for New Year’s Eve. As it is, he will operate at less than three-quarters capacity.
He’s miffed about that.
What has him feeling even more devastated, however, is the time and hassle involved in fixing a water-damaged basement, which had new carpet installed only recently.
He is also concerned about the lingering odor that such damage causes, and estimates “two to three months” of letting the floor dry out before new carpet can even be installed.
“The city is being noncommittal, and we don’t have a commitment from anyone about liability,” Glass said. “But, without that main--their main--rupturing, none of this would have happened.
“And we wouldn’t have this headache.”
