BATON ROUGE - Looming budget cuts that have placed routine maintenance on hold on LSU's campus came rushing to the surface last night as a burst pipe flooded classrooms and a hallway in the Baton Rouge campus' art building.

Faculty services was able to repair the broken pipe Tuesday afternoon, and cleanup crews spent the better part of the morning hours mopping up the water and dumping the garbage cans used to catch the steady dripping.

With cuts to higher education already announced, incidents resulting from small-scale wear and tear could be a recurring problem on college campuses throughout Louisiana.

"Pipes are not on the deferred maintanence list because there is not any type of lifespan for a pipe, so we dont include those on the deferred maintenance list," Tammy Millican of LSU Facility Services said Tuesday.

Instead, the pipes would be considered emergency maintenance with issues handled as they crop up. The university says it is dealing with those scnerarios now, but if the cuts come in as severe a package as is currently forecast, these sorts of problems could become reality with increasing frequency.

LSU students received an email at around 1 p.m. Tuesday to let them know it was safe to use water again.