Severe storms packing hail and blinding rains tore through campus at about 3:30 p.m. Tuesday, leaving buildings flooded, roads closed and classrooms evacuated. 

Flooding occurred at Crouse-Hinds Hall, the School of Information Studies, E.S. Bird Library, Sadler Hall, the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and on Marshall Street. Floodwaters also rose to nearly one and a half feet at the corner of Euclid and Lancaster avenues.

The Department of Public Safety issued an Orange Alert on Tuesday at about 5:12 p.m., urging students to stay indoors because of severe weather with high winds and hail. But the worst of the storm had passed by then. The sirens blared for one minute right after the alert was sent. The Orange Alert ended just after 6:11 p.m.

Hail the size of one to three quarters fell in Syracuse during the storm, said Steven Ippoliti, a National Weather Service meteorologist.

Water moved a desk when it spewed out from the carpet in a classroom in the basement of the iSchool, said Alex Rydzak, a technical lab consultant in the iSchool.

‘I looked over and there was carpet in a bubble and water was shooting out,’ Rydzak said.

Water spread from the classroom into the server room and hallway. The servers went down but were not damaged, and the classroom was evacuated, Rydzak said. Several chairs and tape stretching between the walls blocked off the flooded area. Signs saying ‘Closed due to Flooding’ and ‘No Trespassing’ dangled from the tape.

The down servers were causing many problems for students, but everything should be back to normal by Wednesday morning, said Rohan Kamat, a technical lab consultant in the iSchool.

The server went down inside the Newhouse complex, where an inch and a half to two inches of water covered parts of the basement in Newhouse II after a pipe burst, said Jim Pampinella, manager of network and wiring services for the Information and Technology Services department. ITS officials unplugged the network system, which controls all three Newhouse buildings, and were ready to replace it if necessary, he said.

A portion of University Place in front of Bird was under water, and cones blocked off most cars from entering the street at the corner of University Place and South Crouse Avenue at about 4:30 p.m.

Near that corner, the bottom floor of Crouse-Hinds flooded, causing water to spread into an inventory room. Several SU officials worked to move boxes out of the room as water continued to flow through a corner of the brick wall in the nearby entrance room.

‘We’re just trying to save our publications,’ said Charlotte Tefft, associate director of admissions, who was helping move boxes.

Most of the inventory is shrink-wrapped, so not much was lost, Tefft said.

‘We’ve had flooding before, but never into our inventory room,’ she said.

Christine Fitzsimons, a senior creative advertising major, walked up from the bottom floor of Crouse-Hinds to alert the admissions office of the flooding when water flowed into her classroom.

‘It was really thick, I mean it was really deep,’ she said.

Her class was canceled and evacuated about 20 minutes after it started. People were having difficulty walking around and getting inside, she said.

Part of Sadler Dining Center also flooded at 4 p.m. and was cleaned up by 5 p.m.  

Areas of the sub-basement of Bird flooded after the storm and the northeast quadrant of the building lost lighting, but no students were evacuated from the building, said Pamela McLaughlin, director of communications and external relations at Bird.

About half of Starbucks flooded on the side facing Marshall, said Michael Weiss, a barista. The store never stopped serving customers, but the doors facing Marshall were locked as employees cleaned up the mess, he said.

Just off campus, flooding stretched from the middle of the 600 block of Euclid to the middle of the 700 block, forcing most cars to turn around and find an alternate route.

A Hoagie Haven truck was disabled after trying to drive through the water, observers at the scene said. Six students pushed the Hoagie Haven truck out of the road and into a driveway on Lancaster after it was disabled.

At about 4:40 p.m., about 35 people were standing on water-covered lawns and sidewalks, watching traffic drive through the intersection. As rain began to fall again at 4:57 p.m., most students headed indoors.

Zach Goldstein, a senior entrepreneurship and emerging enterprises major, was sitting on the porch waiting for the rainstorm to come through. Only bigger trucks were able to make it through the intersection, and a smaller car’s bumper was taken off as it tried to drive through, he said.

Sam Okazaki, a junior photojournalism major who lives on the 600 block of Euclid, said she ran outside with her camera at about 4:20 p.m. after hearing the storm.

‘There were torrential downpours instantly,’ she said.

Once the rain stopped, a man rode through the water on a boogie board being towed by a truck, she said.

Joseph Montesano, a senior construction management major at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, said he grabbed his roommate’s kayak and took it out into the middle of Lancaster.

‘I got a text that said there was a flood party on Euclid, so I headed outside,’ he said.

At 4:50 p.m., a Syracuse city truck arrived and an employee began clearing storm drains of debris to allow water through. The street remained flooded nearly an hour later, but the water receded by the night. A flash flood warning remained in effect for Onondaga County through Tuesday night.

mcboren@syr.edu

knmciner@syr.edu

— Asst. News Editor Meghin Delaney and staff writer Liz Sawyer contributed reporting to this article. 

Published on April 26, 2011 at 12:00 pm