By Josh Siatkowski | Staff Writer
A sprinkler system malfunction flooded the kitchen of Memorial Dining Hall Monday afternoon, closing the cafeteria for about two hours and forcing staff to throw out both hot and unprepared food.
“It damaged a lot of food,” Memorial employee Latoya Hamilton said. “The dry storage and all of the stuff like that.”
It was not clear what caused the sprinkler system to go off, but Hamilton said that there was no smoke or fire, although the fire alarm did go off.
According to Hamilton, the sprinkler “went on for a while,” and water reached up to the floor of the meal stations. In a video obtained by The Lariat, water spewed out at high pressure from the ceiling of the storage room and onto the floor. Food items shown in the video included tomato sauce, rice and flour.
Memorial employee Daniel Benns, who filmed the video, said staff was forced to dispose of cereals, seasonings and other dried foods as a result. While he wasn’t sure how much food was damaged, his initial rough estimate was 100-200 pounds. This number could not be verified by The Lariat, but Hamilton said that Memorial would likely have to file an insurance report for the loss.
Benns also said that some hot food was thrown away.
“Due to evacuation, [we] had to also toss the foods from the service line — veggies, butter chicken, rice, beans, pork zucchini and lettuce,” Benns said in a message.
Memorial was closed from about noon to 2 p.m. Monday. During this time, diners were evacuated and diverted to the Student Union Building and Baylor’s two other dining halls, East Village and Penland Crossroads.
Before the diversion, Jennifer Crawford, vice president of operations for Baylor Eats, alerted leaders of both dining halls about the incoming traffic, as she said the noon to 2 p.m. window is the busiest time for all dining halls.
“Because we do batch cooks, we have an ability to increase our production or decrease it based on traffic flow,” Crawford said. “I was in both facilities, and both seemed to be managing the production, while I additionally heard from another leader that the SUB became quite busy.”
Upon checking for safety threats and accounting for all of the employees, Memorial resumed normal operations two hours later. Meal stations that had to throw away food were still preparing new batches later in the afternoon.
“[Memorial] has all been cleaned up to ensure we can operate safely,” Crawford said. “We do not expect any future closures related to [the incident].”
