With rain comes wet classrooms, but leaking in buildings around campus won’t be fixed for at least another year, said City College’s director of facilities.

The ECC portable buildings, the Interdisciplinary building and some rooms in the Campus Center seem to experience the most leaking during the rainy season, including The Channels newspaper lab and neighboring classrooms. Computers in the lab are covered with plastic during rainy weekends to avoid damage.

“These old buildings are simply not built as well as the other buildings,” Julie Hendricks, director of facilities, said. “There will always be problems; there will always be leaks. When there is rainy and stormy weather, then we know we will have a busy day ahead of us.”

Students with classes in the portable buildings are not strangers to these leaks – especially during rainy periods that have occurred in the first weeks of the semester.

Student Brandon Battle said one of his teachers, on a rainy day during class last semester in ECC-18, put out “a recycling bin to catch water.”

Laurie Vicedo, a City College student who also has classes in the portable buildings, said that although leaking isn’t a particular problem in her class, when it rains “it’s loud” – probably because of the fragility of the roof and ceiling.

Part of the problem with the portables is that they weren’t intended to serve as long-term classrooms. This has led to maintenance issues, such as leaking during rains. And because the buildings are not elevated, the floors get wet, muddy, and slippery more quickly and easily on rainy days.

The leaks have been an issue for years, but other than some minor remodeling, there haven’t been any major renovations to the affected buildings, Hendricks said.

Another issue, Hendricks said, is that it’s not always the weather that causes problems. It can be constructional errors combined with leaking pipes, while rain just adds more trouble.

Though the facilities department is working toward a solution, Hendricks said the problem won’t be solved in the near future.

“It is a time consuming problem,” Hendricks said. “When a leak appears, we will try to fix it. But we are a limited staff.”

Hendricks said that over the summer, architects and contractors will be contacted to overlook the leaking dilemma in certain buildings.

Remodeling of the portables, Campus Center and Humanities Building also won’t begin until at least a year from now.

Until then, students and teachers will need to be patient, she said.

But that may prove difficult for some classrooms.

City College student Scott Ammon has witnessed the potential dangers caused by old buildings coupled with little to no renovation.

He said that last semester, during his history class in the IDC building, a portion of the ceiling fell and landed in the middle of the classroom – not during class time – because of water that had built up when it was raining, he said.

“Pieces of the ceiling was falling in the middle of class,” Ammon said, adding that maintenance workers came in the middle of lecture to fix the ceiling. “My teacher was pissed.”

A math teacher in the Campus Center said water leaks from the ceiling on rainy days, and the ceiling looks like it should be fixed. In other classrooms, tiles have had to be removed.

One thing the facilities department can do now, Hendricks said, is have facility staff members prepare for stormy weather by putting sand bags in areas where there may be potential flooding problems.

Other than that, there isn’t much that can be done before the reconstruction begins, she said.

“All you can do is report the problems to us,” Hendricks said. “If you know there will be rain, cover or take away the things that are important.”