The wet floor of the Ansonia Police Department parking garage Sunday evening (Ansonia PD photo).
ANSONIA — Cold temperatures could be the culprit for causing a valve in the sprinkler system in the parking garage at the new Ansonia Police Department to malfunction Sunday night.
The fire alarm sounded around 6:30 p.m. Sunday, according to Lt. Patrick Lynch, but the incident did not trigger the sprinkler system to go off. It was determined that a relief valve in the sprinkler system, located on the second floor of the garage on the East Main Street side, failed, causing some water built up inside a pipe to spill out onto the garage floor.
While Lynch couldn’t determine how much water escaped from the pipe, he said it wasn’t enough to cause any damage to the garage, nor to the building’s interior at 65 Main St. The newly renovated, 22,000-square foot police station, located in the former Farrel Corp. building, just opened last October, following a more than $14 million transformation.
“A relief valve in the sprinkler system gave way and some water in the system came out,” Lynch said. “There was no flooding into the interior of the building. “Some water dumped onto the garage floor. There was no damage. There was no disruption in police services. We’re not sure yet if it was weather-related or the valve just failed. It was not too bad.”
There were no vehicles in the parking garage because the city has to make extensive repairs to the parking garage before vehicles can be stored there, according to city officials. Police park their vehicles in the municipal parking lot and parking spaces along East Main Street.
According to Sheila O’Malley, the city’s economic development director, the company that installed the system, Synergy Fire, based in East Hartford, came out Sunday night and fixed the problem at no cost to the city.
