Hello everyone! I'm writing this from the Office of Admissions' new/temporary home--Strickler Hall. If you haven't been around lately, you may have missed out on the crazy flooding Louisville had on Tuesday, August 4. Coming into work that morning, it was crazy dark. As I approached UofL, it began to rain. Less than an hour later, there was already awful flooding. UofL was one of the worst hit places in the city. As an office (half of which was in the Houchens Building's basement), we began to take as many precautions as we could, which included getting everything off of the floor, moving stuff around, and unplugging electrical cords, among other things. The basement flooded horribly, and water even began to get upstairs as well. More than a few of the staff members in our office lost their cars to water damage. Thankfully for me, my car was parked in the Floyd Street garage, but there was no way to get out of our building, and as far as we knew, the roads all around campus were flooded. As I call it, we were stranded on "Cardinal Island."
Finally, at about 1:30 PM, we received word that people were able to get out of the garage if they took a back route. (This was about the same time boats arrived to take some people to dry land.) We still had to go through a few feet of water from our building to the garage. We were unable to work for a few days as officials tried to figure everything out, but the office reopened on Friday, August 7. It's been a wild ride, but we are so thankful to UofL officials, the physical plant and contracted workers (who are working to have everything ready for school to start and to have everything ready for us to go back to our old "home"), and everyone else who has been so hospitable (especially the REACH crew in Strickler opening their offices to us to work from).
After all of that... the show must go on! School starts on Monday (as scheduled), and Welcome Weekend begins Thursday (I definitely recommend checking out as many activities as you can!)!
To end, I just wanted to share a few of the many pictures I took; I knew I had to get some documentation of this, because people wouldn't believe it!