A faulty fire sprinkler system has been blamed for a flood which severely damaged two Main street Vineyard Haven businesses last week, forcing them to close probably at least until mid-February.

Water flooded Ronni and Peter Simon’s gallery and also parts of Louisa Gould’s adjoining gallery last Friday night after water in a sprinkler pipe apparently froze, rupturing it, and later thawed, releasing a torrent of water.

The floors and some walls in both galleries have now been torn up and will have to be replaced. Ms. Gould has had to remove works which were part of a show which only opened on Dec. 27, but is hoping to be back in business for another show, currently scheduled to open Valentine’s Day. It is the third time she has been forced to close to replace the floors since she first moved in, June 2007; the first because of water damage after a fire upstairs shortly after she moved in, and the second last winter, after the first replacement floor buckled.

Mr. Simon said several inches of water covered the floor in his space, ruining books, calendars, some photos and fittings, “basically anything touching the floor.”

He had yet to figure out the cost of the damage with his insurers, he said. It is understood the contents of Ms. Gould’s gallery were not insured.

The building is owned by Larry Levine and the property is managed for him by Paul Cotton, who said yesterday the first indication of a problem came about 5 p.m. that day when his son noticed ice on the pipe, in an unheated hallway next to the Simon gallery.

“My son called me and said there was a crack and it was leaking, and I told him to wrap some duct tape around it while everyone was notified. I was there 15 minutes later,” he said.

But by then the damage had been done. The system, he said, was supposed to be a dry one, meaning the pipes are filled with compressed air rather than water, until such time as something occurs to lower the air pressure, which then sets off the water.

Usually, that is a fire, but on this occasion the crack in the pipe caused air to leak out and the sprinklers to activate.

The focus of investigations now is on why there was water in the supposedly dry pipes.

Mr. Levine said the sprinkler pipes should have been drained of any condensation during maintenance, but this apparently had not been done. He suspected the water might have been there since the 2007 fire.

“And I’m on a quarterly inspection regime with [the contractor Simplex] Grinnell sprinkler systems, who installed it. They should have drained the system to make sure it was dry.

“I guess the sprinkler company was remiss in not carrying out their full obligation of draining it. They just overlooked it,” Mr. Levine said.

“And in a couple of places the pipes are in unheated spaces, like the stairwell area, and they obviously froze during the cold spell last week, when it got down to seven degrees,” he added.

“I believe a similar thing happened with Brickman’s, too. They also had a fire, and also had some water left in their [sprinkler system], which burst recently. But it went into the street,” he said.

Mr. Levine defended his property manager, Mr. Cotton, against any implication as a result of a Martha’s Vineyard Times report on the flood, that he had been remiss by simply duct-taping the leak.

“He immediately rang the sprinkler people, but Grinnell did not respond right away,” Mr. Levine said.

“How is it my property manager’s fault that the sprinkler people didn’t drain the lines? We’re not supposed to know about that sort of thing,” Mr. Levine said.

Any criticism of Mr. Cotton’s actions, he said, was “utterly misinformed.”

Mr. Simon was irritated, however, that Mr. Cotton had not contacted him immediately once there was known to be a problem.

“The first I knew of it was about 7 p.m., just as I was about to sit down to dinner, when I got a call from Larry Conroy, who runs Courtesy Motors, saying he’d heard there was a big flood at the gallery,” Mr. Simon said.

“So how come I didn’t get any official call from the police or the landlord, or his building manager, Paul Cotton?”

Ms. Gould, despite similar annoyance at not having been immediately informed — she said she did not know until about 8 p.m. — retained a sense of wry humor in the face of her third forced closure for repairs in less than two years.

“Last year I was told it would take one or two months, and it took four and a half,” she said.

“The only upside is the flooring person already has the measurements from last time. So maybe it will be fixed more quickly this time.”

A spokesman for Simplex Grinnell declined to comment for this story.