Faculty members and student advising was relocated due to flooding in the basement level and Subway area of the Mark F. Scully Building on Thursday morning.

The flooding resulted from the severe weather that affected the area on Wednesday night. The flooding was discovered by Facilities Management during the weather conditions as well as faculty members who arrived early on Thursday morning.

Angela Meyer, director of Facilities Management, explained the extent of the issues that the building and staff are facing as well as the effects of the flooding.

"Because of the amount and the direction of driving rain, the drainage in the loading dock area could not handle the volume and therefore came in around the Subway area and began to flood around the Subway, but also into the basement level, and it was a significant amount of water," Meyer said. "We do have night custodial staff on hand, so they were able to respond to start cleaning up. Due to that we also had an electrical outage as it did affect some of the electric in the facility due to the water, but we had electricians come on campus and had the power back up way before classes started."

Shelby Hicks, an interior design instructor at Southeast, was the first to discover the condition of the offices in her department.

"I walked in my office at a quarter to seven and there was water in front of the doors," Hicks said. "The fans were up and things were already moved so they must have known early. There has been a lot of disruption because of the water. I don't have Internet service. We have prep and classes, we even have advising appointments going on."

Hicks also teaches a sustainable design course in which she educates students about how to make the building environment more energy efficient. She explained her reasoning for the water damage by saying that "it has to do with water efficiency." She said the basement level flooding at Scully is a result of not redirecting the source of excess water that runs in from the parking lot that is shared with Dempster Hall.

"Solutions for this problem would be to create a source to hold the water like a rain garden or reservoir," Hicks said.

Despite the setbacks the faculty and staff members experienced due to the flooding, minimal water damage has been discovered so far according to Meyer.

"For the students, nothing really happened, which is the way we like it. But we will have to monitor," Meyer said. "I know several of the offices on the lower basement level had a significant amount of water that we had to extract and put blowers in to dry the carpet. We do have a little bit of drywall damage, but considering, we've had water issues on campus before so it was all manageable and Facilities Management staff responded very kindly and were able to deal with that so it did not affect classes.

"There may be some drywall that we need to remove and reinstall, but we're still assessing. Some of it can dry out and we'll just let it go. Others we'll just have to give it a little bit of time to see if we've got any issues further."