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

Flooding occurred in Crouse-Hinds Hall, the School of Information Studies, E.S. Bird Library, Sadler Hall and the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. There have also been reports of flooding on Euclid Avenue and in the Marshall Street area.

The Department of Public Safety issued an Orange Alert on Tuesday at approximately 5:15 p.m. urging student to stay indoors because of severe weather with high winds and hail. Sirens blared for a minute until 5:16 p.m.

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

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

The 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 from 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, an Itell consultant.

A portion of University Avenue in front of Bird Library was also underwater, and cones blocked off most vehicles from entering the street at the corner of University and South Crouse avenues around 4:30 p.m.

The bottom floor of Crouse-Hinds flooded as well, 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 of anything 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 20 minutes after it started. People were having difficulty walking around and getting inside, she said. 

Areas of the sub-basement of Bird were flooded after the storm and the north east quadrant of the building lost lighting, but not students were evacuated from the building, said Pamela McLaughlin, director of communications and external relations at E.S. Bird Library.

There are multiple power outages in the Syracuse area, according to National Grid’s website. A tornado warning was also issued just after 4 p.m. in South Central New York and Northeastern Pennsylvania, according to an alert from the National Weather Service. The alert is set to end at 4:45 p.m.

Interstate 81 north and southbound lanes at Butternut Street were reported blocked and will be blocked for up to four hours due to flooding at 3:50 p.m., according to a TransAlert from the New York State Department of Transportation.

About half of Starbucks flooded this afternoon, on the side facing Marshall Street, said Michael Weiss, a barista. The store never stopped serving customers, but the doors facing Marshall Street were locked as employees worked to clean up the mess, he said. As of 5:00 p.m. the store was cleaned up and back open.

The servers are down inside Newhouse, where an inch and a half to two inches of water is covering parts of the basement in Newhouse II.

— Compiled by The Daily Orange News Staff

Published on April 25, 2011 at 12:00 pm

news@dailyorange.com