Approximately 50 students, many of them from SMCC, were displaced from their dorm rooms on the USM Portland commons, some of them for almost a month, due to flooding from a burst hot water pipe.  

On January 17th at 6:00pm, Quinn Denis was enjoying a movie in his dorm room on the USM Portland campus after class, before an alarming scenario ruined his Friday night plans. 

“Upon looking into the bathroom I saw that the hot water pipe burst and was flooding the dorm room full of water, said Denis. “We proceeded to grab all of our valuable personal belongings, by the time we left the whole floor was beginning to flood.”

The university held all affected students in the dining hall until 1:00am, when they were allowed to return into the building. Denis’s room was left water damaged. He and his roommates were moved into single-person dorms for an unknown amount of time.Their displacement lasted weeks before they heard anything about moving back into their old rooms or about getting a new one. 

Since the suite that Denis and his roommates shared had its own kitchen with a stove and a refrigerator, they were used to cooking their own meals and did not have to rely on USM’s dining hall. The switch to the single rooms changed this routine since they do not provide a kitchen for residents to use. USM had rewarded residents affected by the flood with ten free meal swipes to use at the dining hall due to this switch.“This was a nice gesture but 10 meals isn’t enough to last someone more than a few days. They also didn’t offer any extra meal swipes after the 10 were provided,” said Denis. Ten free meals means that only three full days of three meals per day were provided, even though they have been displaced from their room and access to a kitchen for over a month now. 

Samantha Wozich, another SMCC student who lives on the affected floor of the USM dorm building was also settling down for the night when the flood triggered the building’s fire alarms. Wozich and her roommate were unaware of what the situation was but proceeded to evacuate, noting that the hallway outside of their room was unusually hot. Upon arriving outside they were not notified about what was actually happening. Unsure if a fire had actually broken out within the building or not. “When we got outside, they told us to stay there. We were just standing outside until they allowed us to go into the Goldrick Center dining hall area,” Said Wozich, “All of us were just sitting there, not knowing what was going on.” 

Residents then received an email stating that they were not allowed to stay in their rooms and to get an RA to bring them to their rooms if they needed anything inside, but that they would only have two minutes to pack everything. The email also stated that residents would have to find somewhere else to stay, maybe somewhere on the SMCC campus, and that if residents had no access to other accommodations that USM would try to find them a room to stay in.

“There was this guy that I have a few classes with, who I saw getting his stuff out of his room at the same time. He said he was just going to sleep in his car that night,” said Wozich. 

The water flooded the entire hallway and unfortunately four of the rooms were deemed  unsuitable for residency, including Denis’s. Wozich’s part of the hallway was not harmed so she and her roommate were allowed back into their room the next night.

The event that caused the flooding and displacement of students was an unexpected emergency and all students were safe, although temperatures that night on the 17th were as low as 16 degrees. Students were told to wait outside in the cold, unsure of what was going on before moving inside some time later. Students were left to figure out their own housing situations for the night, but were highly encouraged to find refuge at the two SMCC dorm buildings, Surfsite and Springpoint. There is no bus line that goes between the two campuses, so students without transportation faced a more difficult situation. 

Since the implementation of free tuition for Maine’s community college’s, SMCC is experiencing  a severe housing shortage. USM’s Portland campus houses some SMCC students who were not able to receive housing on their own campus.  The flood at USM, was a housing crisis for a few students and left most uncertain about if or when they would receive proper housing arrangements again.