watch one of my roommates get up and walk outside (apparently he was also half asleep and thought it was raining. i guess he didnt notice the waterfall as he walked through it). then the fire alarm went off.well, the alarm only went off for a few minutes. this is because the water found its way through the alarm's ceiling mounts. the water got into the alarm and after a couple minutes of having the pitch change to something more like a siren i was finally awake. i tried to take the battery out, but still being a little groggy and having the mystery water pouring all over me i gave up. so i decide to investigate the source of the water and i went upstairs to the top floor of our building. obviously, they are all asleep. so i pound on the door and ring the bell and pound on the door again. finally, one of the guys opens the door. i say: "do you guys have a leak up here or something." and he says: "i think i just stepped in it..." one step closer.
i follow him through the apartment the bathroom door where the floor has about one inch of water and it is flowing into their living room (directly over our light fixture). and the source? you guessed it. the toilet! i have never seen a toilet flood like this one. it looked like a freakin' garden fountain. it was going too fast for the safety switch to release and auto-flush! well, the guy i followed in ( i forget his named--they just moved in) goes over to the toilet and looks at it. just...ya know...looks at it. i guess he, like everyone else, was still asleep. so i peer into the bathroom and say "flip the valve behind the toilet." he looks at me blankly and says "huh?" "behind the toilet there is a valve, turn it."
at this point one of his roommates comes out with a similar blank look on his face. i quickly explain that the toilet is leaking. and he says, "dude, turn off the valve." finally it registers and he turns the valve and shuts off the water. i go back down stairs, leaving the two half-awake neighbors to figure out what to do next by themselves. my guess is they stared at it for a few more minutes and went back to bed. time to see how my roommates were handling the situation.i get down to my apartment to find buckets and tubs catching the water (which has started to seep its way into the bedrooms). i also noticed the alarm was ripped out of the ceiling. i explained what had happened upstairs to my roommates and we went to bed. the water trickled to a stop at about 4am.
by morning the buckets had collected about 15 gallons of brownish yellow water... we have determined that it actually is NOT urine, but rather it is particles of wood picked up from the floor boards and such on its way down (we determined this mostly by the fact that A. the water coming out of the toilet was clear, and B. that would have been WAY too much urine to come from a single person, or single apartment for that matter in order to make that much water turn brown). if there was any urine actually in the water collection it would have been very diluted.
so, when i get back from work my roommate tells me that the carpet cleaners came and ripped up our carpet and put a bunch of fans all over to dry up the mess and sprayed the carpet with some toxic chemicals (he actually read it on the bottles they used) to kill any mold.
neighbor's toilet overflowing into your bedroom: $2 (over two hours of water flow which they will have to pay for in the utilities bill).apartment management paid carpet cleaners: N/A ($50?)apartment management reimbursement to residents who got screwed over: $1.50 (three slices of pizza and a glass of cheap rootbeer per resident).pouring 15 gallon tub-o-pee-pee outside the manager's office: priceless.
(i found out later that the cause was that one of their roommates used the bathroom at about 12:30-1am and pushed the flush valve too hard, causing the chain inside the tank to tangle and let the water flow for over 2 and a half hours)
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