Employees are still dealing with the damage after water came pouring into the Jefferson County Courthouse recently.

Two rooms in the tax assessment office were damaged, along with a conference room and office upstairs when a pipe broke.

“We had ceilings hanging down. There was water running everywhere,” says Commissioner Herb Bullers Jr.

It was a chaotic situation 10 days ago as commissioners say around 6 p.m. they were called to the courthouse. Their I.T. man came into do some work on a Saturday and noticed water in a conference room for litigants. It was dripping down into tax assessment.

“The water was flowing down in the back room, down the wall, but they had gotten it shut off, so it was still dripping, and the ceiling up here was still wet. You could poke your finger through the ceiling,” says Assessment and Tax Claim Bureau Director Susan Seigworth.

Seigworth says two of her employees are crammed into a small room down the hall after their old office was flooded.

They threw tarps over files and didn’t lose any, and four computers were taken away, but everything is stored on the network, Seigworth said.

“We were afraid to turn the computers on because of the water and the electrical systems,” says Seigworth.

Commissioners say this is the second flood since a 2009 renovation.

“What they think happened is that the settings for the valves on one of the individual heating units closed, and opened the vents to the outside, and the pipes froze and it burst the pipes,” says Commissioner Jack Matson, the board chairman.

Now, Commissioner Jeff Pisarcik says they recently signed a contract with Johnson Controls that should help.

“We’ve hired an HVAC company to go through our heating and air-conditioning systems to make sure this doesn’t happen again. We’re looking at ways to put drip pans under any high risk areas,” says Matson.

They also want to use it to train maintenance people, who are all new since the renovation.

“We’re going to use this new company and the contract to train the maintenance people how to run the HVAC system efficiently,” says Matson.

ServPro has submitted a $12,000 bill for cleanup and there’s more work pending, officials said.

The Victim Services room inside the district attorney’s office suite was also damaged.

Bullers, who owns ServPro, said he plans to abstain from an upcoming bid decision on this.

So far, it’s unclear how much all the fixes will cost, but commissioners say insurance will cover it.