“And this guy was yelling, ‘The sky is falling!’” said Steven Laverenz, a second-year studying business construction.

It was a Thursday, the first week of classes. The forecast warned of storms but supposedly nothing above a quarter inch of rain. That concept was quickly flipped on its head as homes, apartments and buildings were flooded. 

Spirits were still high. On the top level of Windsor Manor's parking garage, students were dancing in the rain. Across from the Cedars Apartments, students were wrestling in the water, and across campus others were walking back from their evening classes while jumping in puddles.

Then the flooding alerts came.

“I'd say probably about 9:45, it started like a torrential down pouring of so much rain I've never seen before.” Corbin Kirkland, a freshman studying marketing, said. 

The parking lot connecting the Carriage House and Birch Plaza apartments had begun to fill with rain with some water spilling down the concrete steps and flooding the halls. Against his luck, Kirkland lived in a Birch Plaza apartment below ground level where the water was lapping at his door. 

“People were scooping water out of the front of the apartment and helping us because it would have flooded the front,” Kirkland said. “And then they were scooping water out of here and putting it out into the street so that it wouldn't flood the parking lot as well.”

Another student living at Birch Plaza was lucky enough to avoid the worst of the flooding. 

“Everyone had like a ton of buckets. They pulled out speakers. They were going till like 11:30 or something.” Lewis Bryce, said a freshman studying accounting. “You still see all the totes and stuff they were using out there.”

The parking lot was filled with people, trashcans, bowls, and buckets in hand. Music played as students worked together to manage the rain. 

Down the road, the George S. Romney Building faced a similar fate. 

Avery Quigley, a TA with an emphasis in photography, explained: “It was pretty bad. … I came in around 9 a.m. to my professor telling me to close the lab due to the slight flooding.”

The photography lab in the basement had been overcome with water. Luckily no wires were left on the floor but the studio faced the worst of it. Many props and papers had been drenched from the storm. 

“There was water on the underside of the shelves, … like the cabinet tabletop area, all of that was just drenched. So all of our paper equipment and umbrellas, and luckily nothing electrical in there,” Quigley said.

Even after flash flood warnings, flooded rooms and ruined props, students still found a way to stay cheerful even after an excursion in the rain.