Mount St. Mary's University endured the remnants of Hurricane Ida on Sept. 1, 2021. Hurricane Ida swept through the East Coast with no mercy leaving behind a lot of damage and a whole lot of flooding as well. While Maryland did not get the worst of the hurricane, many students were walking around the Mount’s campus with soaked feet, rain jackets and umbrellas as they hustled to classes in the rain trying to avoid getting soaked.
The lounge and laundry room of McCaffery, University Way outside of Pangborn and behind Bradley Hall were the areas where the rain hit the most. Resident Assistant Tayla Stewart (C '23) lives in McCaffery and spoke about how a lot of the rooms in her building and the Terrace, in general, were flooding. She had never experienced any type of flooding in her house or here at the Mount. As an R.A., she helped clean up around her building where she could and however, she could. “I think the Mount did pretty good in responding to the floods; the custodial staff and the Physical Plant were on it. So the clean-up was pretty good.”
Stewart mentioned that she encountered many students confused about whether or not they still had classes because of the flood. Since the streets were so bad some students had trouble getting to different places on campus, Stewart said canceling classes or having class on zoom, might have been a better idea than having everyone continue to attend in person, in such harsh weather conditions.
Pangborn Hall also had quite a bit of flooding and Resident Assistant Litzy Leiva (C'24) spoke about her experience being a first-year R.A., she said it was stressful and she became very nervous when the basement of Pangborn Hall started to flood. “The basement was flooding and when I stepped outside to the back doors of [Pangborn] it was like a waterfall.” To further her stress about the flood, she had a class while everything was occurring, so she had to multitask to make sure the problems in her building were fixed. Eventually, everything was cleared up and she went about her day with no further issues.
Erik Legg, a Grounds Prospect for the Physical Plant on campus, said they initially began by attaching plows onto trucks to prepare for the flooding. It took the Physical Plant less than nine minutes to respond to the flooding with six units already being out on campus, one of their main focuses was behind Bradley Hall. “With over six units on scene, we started diverting water from Bradley. It's amazing how the force of water can push a truck down even with an emergency brake on,” Legg stated.
After the initial hit of the storm, the Physical Plant and others worked together to clean up the aftermath of the storm. Clearing trees that had fallen, rocks that were in the street, as well as some trash and after a couple of days you could not even tell those different parts of Mount St. Mary's campus flooded.