Bren's Ceiling Collapse

Bren Hall had an exciting Halloween weekend!

Saturday afternoon the ceiling collapsed in front of one of the elevators. No one was hurt, but they had to do a structural survey of the building, which took time. So classes on Monday were canceled because it was late Sunday by the time they figured out the building wouldn't be open. Tuesday's classes were moved to the neighbor Marine Science Institute (MSI) building. Since I only have classes Monday and Wednesday, I had a 6-day weekend (Thursday-Tuesday)! The building was opened today, Wednesday.

They tore down the ceiling near the other elevator (there are two at Bren) since it also looked like it may fall down. The weird thing about the whole collapse is they found no water damage or leaks and the ceiling was built to structural standards/conditions. So they don't know why the ceiling collapsed and apparently it's concerning a lot of people now (makes sense!). Bren Hall is considered one of the forefront LEED standard buildings at UCSB, but also at other campuses. So there's something to worry about. They also put scaffolding at all the walkways because the ceilings above were constructed in similar ways and they want to better look at it.

They kept the fallen piece of ceiling so they can take it somewhere and really study it and see if they can figure out why the ceiling collapsed. To say the least, going to classes today meant a lot of overhead panels were being checked and just various stuff. It also made us all go, "Hmm...is the ceiling going to collapse on me?" when going to class. It's scary, but thankfully no one was hurt and it was only a small section and not like a whole floor or something.

I took photos today which you can see here: Bren's collapsed ceiling
Here's Bren's news announcement of it: News release