DALTON, Pa. --A hardware store in Lackawanna County had a big mess to clean up Friday morning and workers were forced to toss a lot of merchandise in the trash.
Employees at the Dalton Do It Center say Friday is usually a busy day for them with customers hoping to get household work done over the weekend, but a faulty water pipe breaking overnight called for a different kind of "all hands on deck" situation: to clean up the mess, assess the damage, and do everything possible to get the business up and running again.
If you're dealing with a leaky pipe or water in your basement, you might normally be able to find what you need to fix the problem in the Dalton Do It Center's clean up aisle, but Friday morning, workers met a mess, and even they didn't have the right tools for.
"Water everywhere," said owner Scott Lacoe. "All I could hear was water running and it was just falling out of the ceilings and pieces of tile falling. Yeah, it was a mess. It wasn't any good."
Lacoe says a pipe to a sink in the offices upstairs broke overnight. The water spilled through the ceiling, filling the store with water and damaging thousands of dollars' worth of merchandise. He says what he saw opening the doors to his store made him sick.
"Miserable. I wanted to throw up. That's it, it wasn't any good."
Lacoe says the priority now is to get rid of wet insulation and ceiling tiles and get rid of all the water so the business can open as soon as possible.
"Cleaning the ceiling, just, that's all we can do is clean up and try to get open again. We need to get the business back open," he added.
"It's a small community, everybody here knows everybody. You always feel bad when somebody's in a bad spot you want to do whatever you can to help them out," said Chris Griffing of Servicemaster.
Servicemaster is helping Lacoe and his workers navigate the steps on what needs to be done to prevent further damage from water and mold in his business.
There is no word yet on why the pipe burst, but Chris Griffing says this is a good reminder for folks to prepare their homes and pipes for cooler temperatures.
"Wintertime, you want to get your furnace checked out, chimney cleaned, know where your shut-offs are, make sure your carbon monoxide detectors are working. Those are all preventable things," Griffing advised.
The owner of the Dalton Do It Center will provide updates on their Facebook page.