The nine-story Atrium at Clearwater is forced to close after a water leak shorts out its electrical system.
By CHRIS TISCH and AARON SHAROCKMAN
Published September 10, 2004
CLEARWATER - Work by an unlicensed plumbing contractor ruined the electrical system of one of Clearwater's largest office buildings Thursday, closing it for perhaps a week to its 28 business tenants and 250 workers.
The nine-story Atrium at Clearwater building, 601 Cleveland St., will remain shuttered until much of the building's electrical system is replaced, Clearwater fire marshal Joel Gray said.
The chief executive of the company that completed the work, Ecotech Resource of Palm Harbor, said Thursday night his company is a product distributor, not a licensed contractor. Normally, the company subcontracts out installation work to licensed contractors, chief executive Terry Janssen said.
At the Atrium, Ecotech was hired to retrofit the building's toilets, sinks and urinals with fixtures that use less water.
"It appeared at the time, and it should have been, a very simple job," Janssen said. "Wherever it looks to be a simple deal, we sometimes will do it."
While electricians evaluated damage Thursday, some businesses, such as the SunTrust bank that anchors the building, shifted employees to other nearby branches. A sign on the SunTrust drive-through window told customers to visit other nearby offices.
Frank Hibbard, Clearwater's vice mayor and a Morgan Stanley investment officer who works on the seventh floor, said about 45 Morgan Stanley employees were shifted to other branches throughout the county. Hibbard spent part of the morning at a Countryside office.
"Our phones are knocked out," Hibbard said. "It's been hard communicating with people, telling them where we are and what happened."
The leak occurred in a sixth-floor bathroom that was being outfitted with low-flow toilets as part of an effort by property managers to conserve water. After Ecotech crews left about 8 p.m. Wednesday, a 3-inch fitting on a pipe to a toilet cracked and began spraying water, said Shelly Copeland of Wilder Corp., which manages the building.
The bathroom was equipped with a drain that sucked away the water. But part of the spray shot up to the ceiling, where it soaked ceiling tiles. The tiles fell down and clogged the drain, causing the bathroom to flood, Gray said.
Water seeped into a hallway outside, then ran into an electrical room across the hall. The water drained into a main electrical service channel. Once it was in there, water began running through the electrical system on all the lower floors, Gray said.
The water shorted out a smoke detector or pull station on the fifth floor at 4:05 a.m., setting off the alarm and summoning the Fire Department. Because the channel was contaminated with water, firefighters asked Progress Energy to cut the power.
Gray said he arrived at the building about 4:30 a.m. He stood in the lobby and watched as water dripped from the ceiling onto the bushes in the atrium.
"This is like a tropical rain forest now," he said. "This is about the single greatest interruption to commerce you could have in the city of Clearwater. There are some high-dollar tenants in that building. So it's quite a deal there.
"Even the ATM is dead," he added.
Damage is so extensive that even the drywall on several floors may have to be replaced, city officials said.
Janssen said crews installed the toilets properly, but that the 3-inch pipefitting proved faulty. Ecotech systems are in the St. Pete Times Forum as well as in the city buildings in Dunedin and Largo, Janssen said. At Saint Leo University, the program saves 12-million gallons of water each year, he said.
"We typically don't get involved in installs," Janssen said. "We sell the product, and it works.
"We had a great program going great. I'm just heartsick this happened."
Copeland, the property manager, said she was introduced to Ecotech by an official with Pinellas County Utilities. She said Janssen gave her insurance papers. She did not ask for a copy of his contractor's license because she assumed if he had insurance, he was licensed.
"He gave me a client list a mile long," she said.
When told by a St. Petersburg Times reporter that Ecotech was not licensed, Copeland was upset.
"I cannot believe this," she said. "It's not right. It's just not right."
The forced closure proved quite an ordeal for the building's tenants.
Employees with Aneco Electrical Construction tried to take as much as they could from their corporate offices on the sixth floor, where the pipe burst.
Susan Hermann, a branch office administrator at Aneco's second Clearwater location on South Martin Luther King Avenue, said workers were still scrambling Thursday afternoon.
"We got out of there as fast as we could with as much as we could," said Hermann, who said 35 employees work out of the Atrium building.
At Lonni's Sandwiches, Etc. on the ground floor, workers slowly removed dozens of eggs and pounds of deli meat from already thawed coolers. Manager Kathy Parker said she wasn't sure how much of the $5,000 in food could be saved.
"Maybe half, if we're lucky," Parker said.
Cars took the food to the deli's three other Tampa Bay locations to be inspected and stored. Parker said the six-employee store stands to lose $1,200 each day the sandwich shop is closed.
The building also houses offices of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the FBI, which shifted agents to other offices or allowed them to work from home. No investigations were delayed because of the situation, officials with both agencies said.
Copeland said she has been working for almost a year to clip the building's water bills, which were totaling $60,000 per year. The building has been installing water-free urinals and low-flow toilets that have been cutting that bill in half.
"This is my project, so I feel really terrible," she said. "I just feel so terrible because I was trying to do a conservation project and it resulted in disaster. It ruined my beautiful building and my tenants can't go to work."
