When a water pipe bursts, it can quickly cause a lot of damage if you don’t get rid of the water right away.

What would you do if there was water flowing into your classroom but the maintenance guy said to let the water build up to push it through the clogged pipe?

That is what happened to the science teacher in this story, but when he stopped having students dump the water out the window, it really backfired.

Let’s see the downfall from listening to the maintenance guy.

Water main burst, maintenance guy told me to stop dumping water out the window

I’m a high school science teacher and a few years back a water main burst in my classroom.

I saw the drain was clogged so I sent the majority of the class to the library and grabbed some students I knew could handle themselves from coaching wrestling and football.

I had them help carry water to the window in trash cans while I called Building and Grounds.

Why would he want to let the water build up?

A few minutes later a maintenance guy came in and yelled at me, told everyone to leave and that we should let the water fill the class until the pressure cleared the blockage in the drain.

The water pressure did not clear the blockage in the drain.

The whole hallway on both sides flooded, as did the hallway beneath it, mold grew and we had to shut down over 40 classrooms for over a year.

There wasn’t enough classroom space and we had to split the student body in half and have one group come in from 5 am to 11 and the other come in from 11-5 pm.

What a nightmare.

The repair cost the district over $15 million.

All spring sports were cancelled for the year, the next year’s fall sports were cancelled too and in a lot of ways the district never recovered.

I got a load of crap from my supervisor, a VP and the school principal in the immediate aftermath and wasn’t brought back the next year.

I got offered my old job back when they realized how much damage I was trying to prevent but had already moved on to greener pastures.

It should have been the maintenance guy who got let go. He stopped the kids from saving the school.

Read on to see what the people in the comments on Reddit have to say about it.

Yeah, he was clearly underqualified.

I was wondering this same thing.

It really doesn’t make any sense.

Exactly, stopping the leak is step #1.

This person thinks that water would never clear the clog.

But what was he doing about the leak?

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