An overflowing toilet flooded Harbin Hall’s third floor with sewage water Oct. 27, destroying residents’ belongings and leaking onto the second floor, less than four weeks after a similar incident affected the same floor. 

Eighteen residents in a boys’ cluster found their rooms filled with sewage from the bathroom that then leaked to the girls’ cluster below them on the second floor, taking hours to clean and leaving dehumidifiers for three days. A Sept. 30 flood affected the same clusters and included even more sewage, prompting concerns over widespread issues with the Harbin plumbing system.

According to Pruthvi Jasty (MSB ’26), a Residential Assistant (RA) for the third floor, most residents were instructed to stay in their rooms while they were being cleaned without alternative housing options, and some rooms suffered up to $1,500 in damages, which the university reimbursed.

Corbin Chance (CAS ’28), whose third-floor room was flooded while he was away for the weekend, said all of his belongings were soaked with sewage, amounting to $510 in damages.

“I got so upset — it was a pretty terrible day,” Chance told The Hoya. “I was like, literally what am I going to do? All of my roommate’s stuff was soaked. When I came back, $510 worth of my personal belongings were completely damaged.”

A university spokesperson said the university wants to provide safe, livable residential spaces, and the Office of Residential Living and Facilities Management quickly responded to both situations.

“Impacted students received updates on the situation and were provided with instructions on how to submit a property claim if they believed their items were damaged due to the water intrusion,” the spokesperson wrote to The Hoya. “Students were provided with information about alternate locations they could use if they wished to leave their rooms during remediation, and all impacted students were able to access and stay in their assigned rooms by the evening.”

Chance said he did not feel comfortable staying in his room despite the university’s assurances that it was clean, adding that he was not offered any alternative housing options.

“I don’t know what they meant by sanitized because there was hair and lint and other things that came out of the toilet sitting in the corner of the room,” Chance said. “It was not sufficiently sanitized.”

Olivia Holland (CAS ’28), who lives on the second floor, said that while she was not in her room during the October incident, she had been there when the September flooding began.

“I was doing some homework in the room and I started hearing this ticking sound. I thought it was a clock at first — it was water dripping,” Holland said. “So I looked around and all of a sudden, shit-water started streaming down, like a waterfall.”

Jasty said it remains unclear what the cause of the incidents were.

“When it’s a recurring issue, I think it’s a pipe or something that’s a deeper facilities issue that they aren’t willing to address,” Jasty said.

Chance said the repeated incidents were frustrating as he tried to continue with schoolwork.

“I don’t want to keep having this happen to me,” Chance said. “It takes time and energy out of my school year, where I end up having to miss a whole bunch of classes just to clean up this mess and take care of my space.”

Jasty said he spoke to other residents and has not discovered any issues of clogging toilets, and he was warned that there was a risk of another incident regardless of actions residents take.

“That’s just frustrating — this shouldn’t be something that happens regularly or something that we have to prepare for, instead of them finding the root issue,” Jasty said. “I understand the work they’re doing is demanding but I feel like this is something we shouldn’t have to anticipate.”

Holland added the cleanup process made it impossible to get work done, especially during midterm season.

“We can’t do our work because we are scrubbing floors, vacuuming seven times, washing our walls,” Holland said. “It’s a struggle to be a freshman, to deal with these classes and midterms for the first time, and to have to spend six hours scrubbing my room.”

“It’s inexcusable to happen twice,” Holland added. “I understand once, but the full tuition here is quite a lot — we should have, for the most part, stable facilities.”