Robins Hall residents flushed away in the second residence hall flood at UR in less than a week

Students on the first floor of Robins Hall at the University of Richmond were relocated early Wednesday morning following a toilet malfunction that drenched the hallway and seven rooms. 

Fourteen first-year students fled their rooms around 1:30 a.m. after a maintenance fix on a broken toilet went wrong, resulting in a propulsion of water similar to the one seen in Gray Court last Friday. 

The flood originated in first-year Skylar Schuetze and Sydney Reis’ bathroom. 

Reis’ friend had used her restroom around 1 a.m. when the water in the bowl started to “whirlpool” as it kept constantly flushing, she said. They called maintenance to fix it, but a valve was incorrectly unscrewed and water started to burst out, similarly to when a fire hydrant is opened, according to a video taken by Reis. 

“Once [the valve] came off, that’s when it really started moving,” Reis said.

The toilet has since been fixed, but the damage was already done. 

Once the water started exploding out of the valve, Reis went around with her resident assistant and woke up her neighbors. By that point, the water reached nearly two inches high in her room and was flowing into the hallway. 

“We were going around like ‘pick up anything valuable you have, your room’s about to be flooded’,” Reis said.

First-year Emily Asselin and her roommate Matty Young live in the room to the right of Schuetze’s and Reis’. They had both been asleep when Reis started to frantically knock on their door. The minute they answered the door, water from the hallway immediately spilled into their room. 

“It was already flooded,” Asselin said. “The whole hallway was already wet, down to [the end].” 

Asselin and Young’s toilet had a similar issue earlier this week and kept flushing on its own, but maintenance fixed it without a hitch, the students said. 

Schuetze, who was staying over at a friend's place Tuesday night, learned that her room had flooded on Snapchat the following morning. 

“I slept through ‘bathroomgate’,” she said. “People were posting pictures of my room, and I was like ‘wait, why is it wet?’.”

Asselin and Young crashed in their friend’s room for the remainder of the night, but anyone who had nowhere to go had to sleep in the third floor lounge in Robins Hall, they said. All 14 students have since partially moved to unoccupied rooms on the third floor, with the bulk of their belongings still stuck in their original rooms on the first floor. 

Schuetze and Reis were the only students moved to an empty triple room on the all-male second floor. 

Both first-years, having faced the brunt of the flood in their room, want the university to cover their lost items, including items like their rugs and Reis’ destroyed $59 Urban Decay eyeshadow palette. 

“It wasn’t like we flushed something down the toilet,” Reis said. “It was, like, the maintenance guys said that the toilets are so old that they malfunction sometimes.” 

Robins Hall was originally built in 1959, but underwent a renovation in 2021 that included a new bathroom, according to the UR website. 

Most of the plumbing systems across campus are located either in the building walls or underground, according to the UR website. It is unclear when the plumbing in Robins Hall was last modified.

The university will be replacing the hallway floor entirely rather than drying it to guarantee that there will be no lingering issues, according to an email sent to affected students and their guardians. The same third-party laundry service that was offered to students impacted by the flood in Gray is also available to them. 

The waterlogged hallway has been packed with green dryers, which can be heard from the stairwell. The floors are dry now, but the students will not be permitted to return to their rooms until at least Oct. 5 or 6 as repairs are underway, according to the email. 

Contact executive editor Caitlin McCormack at caitlin.mccormack@richmond.edu.