Cold weather can land students in hot water if they leave their dorm room windows open.

When temperatures drop below zero, inactive water can freeze in sprinkler and water pipes, causing them to burst and flood dorm rooms.

“Usually this happens in subzero weather,” said Steve Sowa, assistant director of facilities management operations. “It’s the bitter cold that causes the problems.”

When students leave their windows open, cold air blows on the pipes and the water freezes inside, Sowa said.

“When it freezes, the pipe expands to twice its size and puts pressure on the seams and joints,” he said. “The pipe just rips open, and then when the ice starts to melt, it floods.”

Although temperatures dipped below zero several days last week, there were not many pipe-bursting incidents on the Evanston campus, he said. The biggest problems occurred on the Chicago campus in the Robert H. Lurie Medical Research Center, part of the Feinberg School of Medicine, where several labs flooded when frozen pipes burst, Sowa said.

Weinberg freshman Micah Friedland said a pipe burst in his room in Bobb Hall a little more than two weeks ago. He said he did not leave his window open, but his radiator was broken and his room got as cold as it was outside.

“I’ve had a broken radiator all year, and I had told them but nothing happened,” Friedland said. “When the temperature dropped below freezing, the radiator froze and exploded in the front part of my room.”

Friedland said some of his belongings got ruined in the resulting flood, but he plans to report it so he can get reimbursed.

“This could have been completely avoided if they had fixed the radiator when they first knew about it,” Friedland said.

On Feb. 17, Mary Goldenberg, director of residential life, and Garth Miller, executive director of university housing and food service, sent a letter to students living in dorms urging them to take measures to keep pipes from freezing.

The letter advised all students to keep their windows closed during the extreme cold to prevent the pipes from freezing and cracking.

“A leak may not become evident until several hours later when the frozen radiator thaws,” Goldenberg and Miller wrote in the e-mail. “Please do not open your window to cool your room.”

Students should never turn their radiators completely off, as that could also cause the room to become cold enough to make the pipes freeze, they wrote in the e-mail. They urged all students to report broken radiators as soon as possible to prevent damage from the cold weather.

Mary Goldenberg declined to comment for this story, and Garth Miller could not be reached despite several e-mails and phone calls.

Mark D’Arienzo, associate director of university housing, said the letter was sent out to prevent floods like the one that happened in Friedland’s room.

“We knew we’d had problems in the past,” D’Arienzo said. “We just wanted to alert students and prevent further problems.”

Reach Aliza Appelbaum at [email protected].