Broken pipe floods Macy’s upper floors

A frozen 3-inch sprinkler pipe ruptured Friday night on the top floor of the Macy’s department store in downtown Spokane and water poured through the 11-story building.

Nine Spokane firefighters were called to the store at Main and Wall shortly before 9 p.m. when an alarm system detected the leak. Arriving firefighters reported two to three inches of water on the 11th floor, and water was still spilling onto lower floors an hour later.

Capt. Mike Thompson estimated that 3,500 gallons of water may have been spilled in the 12 to 14 minutes it took to shut off the broken pipe. He said “quite a bit” of water got all the way to the building’s subbasement through elevator shafts and other openings between floors.

Firefighters broke off a toilet on the 10th floor and used squeegees to force water down the exposed drain.

“I didn’t see a lot of merchandise damage, but I wasn’t on every floor,” Thompson said.

There is no merchandise, just storage and office space, above the fifth floor.

Thompson said the heat had been turned “way down” in the 11th-floor storage area.

“It’s probably fine 95 percent of the time,” Thompson said of the lack of heat. “But that real cold, near-zero weather we had …”

He said water apparently froze at an “elbow” in the sprinkler pipe, cracking the pipe but plugging the break with ice. Then Friday’s warmer temperatures likely thawed the ice.