Many residents woke up Thursday morning to flooding right outside their doorsteps after a major storm cell had come and gone.
Though the storm didn’t produce the widespread power outage originally feared, some Athens streets had water levels high enough to float a canoe. Residents posted pictures of flooded streets such as Palmer and East State early Thursday on social media sites.
It was not immediately clear the exact streets, parking lots and other spaces that had flooded, and Athens Deputy Service Safety Director Ron Lucas could not be reached for comment.
Ohio University’s campus was affected as well. The heavy pressure from the rainwater caused the roof hanging over the box office and main entrance of the Templeton-Blackburn Alumni Memorial Auditorium to leak to the floors below.
"Water went down into the basement level as well,” said Mike Gebeke, Ohio University’s executive director of facilities management. "We are seeing what we’re going to have to do to get that fixed."
He said that from what he has noticed, those have been very minor; but, he admitted he hadn’t been in the office long enough to know what specifically others in his department were working on.
"They’ve been for buildings with windows left open or some water getting into stairwells,” Gebeke said. “Easily cleaned up and didn’t cause much damage.”
Harry Wyatt, Ohio University’s associate vice president for facilities, said he met with city officials about the storm in the morning. However, this was before the second wave of rainfall that caused most of the flooding. As a result, there wasn’t anything that had occurred.
The university had prepared for the possibility of a widespread power outage before the storm.
"We have some generators and different assets in hand in case of a derecholike event, and we made sure we had them available,” Gebeke said. “If I got a phone call in the middle of the night, we would’ve been prepared. It’s always nice when you prepare for something like that and it doesn’t happen.”
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