Stanford Today Edition: March/April, 1998 Section: News on Campus: After the Storm WWW: After the Storm
News on Campus
Staff, students and faculty struggled to return to normal after a series of February storms pounded campus.
During the early hours of Feb. 3, when drains could not handle flow from the heavy downpour, rain flooded vents, spilled down stairwells and broke through doors and walls. Up to four feet of mud filled the basements at the School of Education headquarters in Cubberley Hall, the Braun Music Center, Green Library and the Jonsson Government Documents Collection in Meyer Library. The floods damaged book and music archives, caused power outages and forced some students out of their dorm rooms. Classes were canceled for a day - the first time since the 1989 Loma Prieta quake.
When flooding was detected shortly after midnight, the Stanford community mobilized through e-mails and phone calls. Scores of volunteers helped library staff haul books and other materials from the knee-high water to higher floors. Within hours, more than 120,000 books and documents had been removed from the affected areas and trucked to a cold-storage facility to be frozen before mildew could set in. Library officials expect to preserve much of the material through that process.
"Members of the community were incredible," said President Gerhard Casper at a Faculty Senate meeting. "The organization and its speed were awesome."
At the same time, some students found ways to enjoy the water. The flooded center of campus turned into a water park: Students floated in baby pools, rafted with mattresses down Campus Drive, rolled inside garbage cans and played Frisbee and football.
Losses are expected to go beyond Stanford's $1 million self-insured limit. Despite the rapid reaction to the flood, some valuable materials were lost. The Braun Archive of Recorded Sound, for example, had to dispose of more than 10,000 recordings.
"It was just devastating," said Ellen Handler Spitz, an Art Department lecturer who shared one of the carrels flooded in Green. "All my work was there; my whole professional life was there." ST