The party at Crews & Tangos got sloppy June 29 after a dancer tried to use an overhead pipe as a monkey bar, triggering the sprinkler system throughout the club.
Water sprayed all over the dancefloor when the man “hung on a pipe and tried to put his feet up on it,” says co-owner Paras Prashed.
When the pipe broke at around 1am, the sprinklers switched on and drenched the club with water on both levels. Soggy revellers raced for the exits while staff frantically shut off the system and swept the water out the front door. The fire department was called immediately.
“Everything is fine. There was quite a bit of water damage, but it’s all fixed now and we were ready for business at 10:30am,” Prashed says. “We worked all night, but we did it.”
Prashed says it’s not the first time the dancer has tried to hang off the ceiling pipe. “We have him on video camera when it broke. He ran out of the building after. We know who it is. He’s done it before.”
There were between 400 and 500 people in the club at the time, Prashed says. He could not provide an estimate of how much damage was done.
“We lost one projector, but all the DJ equipment and lighting was safe,” he says. “We had all the water out of the building in an hour.”
By the next morning, there was a sign on the door promising that the club would not be closed over Pride weekend, something that would have been devastating for business.