The Home Depot may be closed for at least part of this weekend after a sprinkler head malfunctioned in the Kings Highway Cutoff store Friday night and flooded it with water, firefighters said.
"You can swim in here," Fire Chief Richard Felner said, adding that the mega-store would have been better off having a fire.
Felner said the sprinkler head near the front of the store, by the plumbing aisle, was spraying water for around 40 minutes and that merchandise in four aisles was soaked. The water wasn't confined to those aisles, though. Felner said it had spread throughout the store. "It just keeps spreading out. There's nothing to hold it in," he said.
Felner said a cleaning crew was due to come in Friday night to begin mop up operations and he said the store almost certainly would be closed Saturday.
Employees outside the store Friday night turned customers away but said the store should be open Saturday because cleanup crews would be working all night. The store was open when the sprinkler head went off, and the parking lot was wet with water.
Firefighters aren't sure why the sprinkler head malfunctioned. Felner said the head, which is about 40 feet in the air, wasn't near a source of heat, and it may have just been old or rusted. "There's nothing up there that set it off. It could have been a faulty head," he said.
Felner said the head shot water over a 15-foot radius and that the water spread all over the store. He estimated it was about an inch deep across the store by the time firefighters could shut off the head. He estimated damage from the incident at $50,000.
