Residents forced out of Tampa luxury condo tower after sprinkler flood

TAMPA Hurricane season is over but residents of one luxury Tampa condo tower have been flooded out of their homes by a broken sprinkler system.

Thousands of gallons of water cascaded down stairwells and poured through light fixtures of the Stovall on Bayshore Boulevard on Nov. 4 when a worker, about to fall off scaffolding, broke a sprinkler pipe that he had grabbed to steady himself.

There was so much water in parts of the 22-story tower that it looked like Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean ride, as a Tampa Fire Rescue captain put it.

Electricity remains shut off to all 33 units and residents have spent the past month in hotels, second homes or bunking with relatives.

Despite damages estimated in the millions, "all in all, the building will be whole again before Christmas and hopefully within the next week,'' Gloria Giunta, president of the condominium association, said Thursday.

Giunta said she was away from the Stovall that Tuesday morning when she looked down at her cellphone. "I was getting calls from everyone,'' she said. Giunta hurried home to find that firefighters already had responded to an automatic fire alarm in the building at 3203 Bayshore Blvd.

Jason Penny, a spokesman for Tampa Fire Rescue, said water was dripping from the light fixtures as the fire crew entered the lobby. A security supervisor told them that a person doing drywall work had accidentally broken a sprinkler pipe while helping to renovate an 11th floor unit.

The firefighters headed up and quickly turned off the sprinkler pump. But water already was inches deep in that apartment and flowing down the stairs and into 19 other units.

"You can't turn off gravity,'' Penny said.

Water was shut off to the entire building, and ServPro, a disaster response service, was soon "up and running with blowers and dehumidifiers and everything you could possibly think of to get the building stable,'' Giunta said.

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Residents forced out of Tampa luxury condo tower after sprinkler flood