George Young Community Center in Jamesport temporarily closes after frozen pipe breaks

A frozen pipe fractured near an exterior wall in the ceiling of the century-old George Young Community Center in Jamesport, forcing the Riverhead Town facility to close briefly and prompting cancellations and relocations of several Riverhead Town Recreation Department programs. A janitor discovered about an inch of water pooling in the basement on Tuesday, and town staff moved quickly to contain the damage.

Grounds crew members arrived onsite the same day and immediately shut the water off, town officials said. Riverhead Town engineer Ken Testa said the water remained contained to the basement and that the pipe burst “wasn’t too extreme,” limiting structural impact to the former elementary schoolhouse that now houses community programs.

Testa explained the likely cause as a heat-transfer problem between the basement ceiling and the upper floor: “It is difficult for heat to move between basement ceiling and the upper floor, which caused the pipe to freeze and fracture near the exterior wall in the ceiling.” Cleanup of the flooded areas took about a day and a half. Once the broken pipe thawed out, crews repaired the break and replaced ceiling tiles, and buildings and grounds staff cleaned the affected spaces.

Town engineers assessed the damage and provided an update during a call late Thursday, Feb. 12. Supervisor Jerry Halpin announced the temporary shutter at the town board work session Thursday morning. Testa said the crews had completed cleanup and were conducting checks for further leaks: “We think we got it all buttoned up,” Mr. Testa said. “The building was all cleaned out today, and we expect it to be back open [Friday] morning. We just want to make sure that there are no other leaks from the repairs we made.”

The interruption affected programming across Riverhead Town’s recreation offerings, with several activities canceled or moved while repairs were under way. Officials did not release the names or number of programs affected; organizers relocated affected sessions to other venues or canceled them for the brief outage, according to town communications.

Halpin praised the response of town maintenance staff and signaled a focus on longer-term systems work: “Our amazing buildings and grounds crew was there cleaning it up,” Mr. Halpin said. “In the future at one of these work sessions we’re going to be talking about fixing that heat system, which has been kind of been band aided together … We’re so thankful that no one was hurt, nothing happened and it was just property damage.”

Town engineers and grounds crew required the repairs to be completed and verified before activities at the George Young Community Center could resume. With cleanup finished and the pipe repaired, officials expected the Jamesport building to reopen on Friday morning pending final leak checks.