The flooding of one of the new Lofts buildings last week was the result of a problematic drain, Project Manager Nancy Marshall said.

A Woodard Cleaning & Restoration Services truck removes water from the lobby of a Lofts building on Wednesday, Aug. 27. The building flooded after a quick storm overwhelmed a courtyard drain with excess water, which diverted to the lobby instead.

On the evening of Wednesday, Aug. 27, a large storm caused flooding in the lobby of the 6300 Enright Ave. building, one of four parts of the Lofts of Washington University.

Marshall explained that the flooding was the result of the suddenness of the storm, which overwhelmed a drain in the building’s courtyard.

“The drain in the corner of the courtyard got backed up because it wasn’t able to hold all the water that came from both the roof and the courtyard,” Marshall said.

Marshall dispelled the rumor that the flooding was due to a lack of sealant under the windows. She added, however, that the array of solar panels covering the building’s roof might have been part of the problem.

“We think that possibly the solar roof panels…might be distorting the water flow as it was originally designed,” Marshall said. “When the roof was originally designed, we didn’t have solar panels designed on there, so we think that those solar panels might be…overloading one drain and not using the other secondary drains.”

Marshall said that in the next few weeks, the drain will be altered to have a larger capacity. As a temporary solution until the drain can be expanded, a sump pump was installed in the courtyard to pump excess water into the street. There were no flooding problems during Monday night’s thunderstorm.

“This was just a very unique situation where a lot of stars aligned to create an unusual response,” Marshall said of last week’s flooding.

Although Lofts residents last week indicated concerns that the flooding was symptomatic of larger problems with the buildings’ construction, Marshall stressed that the Lofts were structurally sound.

“Those kinds of things are typical on any project, but I would say we go to great lengths to make sure that when we turn over these spaces that they are indeed built as designed. There’s so many things that go into a project like this that it’s possible that something could come up like the water thing,” she said.

A week after the initial flooding, the concerns about the incident have abated among residents as well.

Senior Hayley Perlis was concerned that the flooding might recur during Monday’s storms but said that because it didn’t, she was not too worried about future problems.

“For the most part, I feel pretty good about [the Lofts]. The main concern was the flooding last week and the storm on Monday…there weren’t any actual problems on Monday, but I was worried that there might have been after last week,” she said.

Junior Jordan Finkelstein, who lives in the Lofts building next door to 6300 Enright, said he was impressed by the University’s response last week.

“It’s not like they let the building flood and they didn’t do anything about it,” he said. “They were very much attending to the situation and being informed and letting students know what’s going on.”