All floors of the Bentall Three office tower reopened Wednesday morning, following a water leak Tuesday morning that forced more than half the building to be closed down.
But employees of Omicron, a design and construction firm that occupies the worst-damaged floors four and five, are unable to start work until they have rolled up their sleeves and cleaned up the mess, a source told Business in Vancouver.
The company had expected to move its 120 employees into temporary space until further notice, but is now planning on resuming operations in the Bentall tower as soon as possible.
Beverley Attfield, Omicron’s director of marketing and communications, said Tuesday that the company’s servers were down and the company’s email was offline.
About 1,000 people who work at the Bentall Three building were left scrambling to get their work done from home or coffee shops yesterday morning 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 not operating. All floors below the 18th had to be shut down.
A restoration company is working on extracting the water and drying out carpets, Tony Astles, executive vice-president of the building's managers Bentall Kennedy, said Tuesday.
He added, “It’s a bad thing for tenants to have to go through. We really regret the occurrence. You can’t prevent these kinds of accidents.”
