Downtown mall closes after water pipe bursts

Most businesses in Brandon’s Town Centre mall were closed on Monday due to having no running water after a pipe burst over the weekend.

Plumbers on Monday were assessing the damage to an empty office space on the main floor that had a collapsed ceiling due to a leak in the mechanical room above it.

A crew of maintenance workers were mopping up a large area of water that had pooled in the hallway between The Town Centre’s administrative office and Roman’s General Store.

Timi Abikoye, who works in the food court at Styles Kitchen African Restaurant, said he was in the mall on Sunday around 4:30 p.m. accepting product deliveries when he noticed the leak.

“It was as if like someone is in the shower,” he said while describing the leak.

“It was very scary.”

Abikoye said he worried the main floor of the building would soon be covered in water and noticed that three to four tenants already had wet floors or carpet. He reached out to a maintenance worker, but they were already made aware of the leak, Abikoye said.

When he came to work on Monday, Town Centre staff told him the mall would be closed for the day because maintenance workers had to turn off the main water source.

“We will have hungry customers, but we can only let them know what happened,” he said.

“It’s out of our control. It’s not what we planned for,” he said.

Maintenance workers told him they had their “fingers crossed” the issue would be fixed by the end of the day, so businesses could reopen today.

Abikoye continued to prepare Nigerian and West African food using water from a jug he had purchased to cook and clean.

The owner of Akos Enterprises, a store across from the restaurant, said the mall’s closure is “really disappointing” because it impacts her schedule for food delivery and customers wanting to pick up their orders.

“We already have our day plans today, and then we have a lot of workers that we’ve already arranged for today’s work, so we just have to cancel everything,” Adijat Buhari said in her shop, which sells produce, frozen meat and dried African food products.

“It’s really affecting us because we do cut some of our meat — like we sell frozen chicken and fish — so we can’t operate our machine to do the cutting for today,” she said.

Town Centre maintenance and administrative staff declined to comment on Monday and referred inquiries to the Winnipeg-based owner of the building, who did not respond before press time.

A staff member from Prairie Mountain Health, whose offices are located in the mall, told the Sun they were sent home on Monday morning because they had no running water.

The Brandon Public Library, the Royal Bank of Canada and The Brandon Sun remained open and were not affected by the water issue.

Throughout the day, three security guards stood near the building’s entrances to tell people the mall was closed.

» tadamski@brandonsun.com