All but two floors of the Bentall 3 office tower are expected to reopen Wednesday morning, following a water leak Tuesday morning that forced more than half the building to be closed down, says the building's management.
However, the fourth and fifth floors – which got the worst of the flooding – will remain closed today, and it's not known when they will be ready to be reoccupied, said Tony Astles, executive vice-president for Bentall Kennedy.
About 1,000 people who work at the Bentall 3 building were left scrambling to get their work done from home or coffee shops earlier today when they showed up for work only to find that they were not allowed into the building.
A burst water pipe on the 18th floor of the 32-storey office tower at the corner of Burrard and Dunsmuir streets had flooded the floors below. Employees working above the 18th floor were able to get to their offices Tuesday, although some elevators were shut down. All floors below the 18th had to be shut down, however.
Omicron, a design and construction firm, occupies the two floors that got the worst damage – four and five.
Beverley Attfield, Omicron's director of marketing and communications, said the company's servers were down Tuesday and the company's email was offline.
The company scrambled to get its 120 employees into temporary space outside the Bentall building. They are expected to have to work out of a temporary location until further notice.
A restoration company is still working on extracting the water and drying out carpets, Astles said. It's not yet known how long it will be before the two floors can be reoccupied.
"It's a bad thing for tenants to have to go through," Astles said. "It's a terrible nuisance. We really regret the occurrence. You can't prevent these kinds of accidents."
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