Water From Closed Tulsa Restaurant Covers Parking Lot, Streets With Ice

The former Spaghetti Warehouse building is drying out after a ruptured pipe flooded the place Tuesday night.

The flood inside turned into ice outside, and while that's taken care of, the real cleanup is just beginning.

A waterfall poured through the front doors of the Spaghetti Warehouse building after firefighters broke in.

The water flooded the parking lot and surrounding streets, promptly freezing and creating a traffic problem around the block.

City salt trucks were sent out to soften the ice and plows were used to move it to the side.

Thousands of gallons of water flooded out of a ruptured pipe.

3/13/2017 Related Story: Downtown Tulsa's Spaghetti Warehouse To Close 

“As it freezes and breaks the pipe, you don't get the flood then because it's frozen,” said Tulsa Fire Captain Stan May. “But when it thaws a little bit, a leak starts and the warm water following it up cleans the pipe out and you get a deluge like we had.”

The floodgates were opened after a night of firefighters watching water trickle out of every crack around the building.

They couldn't reach the owner for a key to get in, so the city shut down the main line to the building but the water kept coming.

It was a second line feeding the fire sprinklers that had cracked, spraying water onto windows on the second floor and flooding everything underneath.

“Once we broke into the place and got to the sprinkler, we could shut them off,” Captain May recalled. “There were three risers in there; we had to shut off.”

The city can usually shut off all the water, but, in this case, the critical valve was paved over on Detroit Avenue.

The water department had to find it with a metal detector and dig it up to turn it off.

Though the inside was flooded, it's mostly empty. The trolley is one of the few fixtures left inside.

Spaghetti Warehouse never owned the building, they just rented it. The owner is a management company in Phoenix.