Chris Chambers had just relieved his fellow security officer on Oct. 8, a clear night. "Then about 5:15 it just started pouring," Chambers said.

"At about 7:30 I went into Sutcliffe to turn off our outside lights. After I turned off the alarm, I heard a little 'pung' noise. It wasn't something I had ever heard before. I tried to figure out where it was coming from."

Chambers stood by the reception-ist's desk and looked toward the International Renewal Ministries department. He saw a reflection of IRM's door on the floor. "I was thinking to myself, 'That's not right,'" Chambers said.

"As soon as I got down the ramp, my feet hit water." He said nearly 4 inches of water covered the floor in front of the IRM department. Beside the parking lot door, between 8 inches and 1 foot of water had accumulated. Water streamed under the bottom of the door into Sutcliffe.

Chambers returned to security and called the on-call officer, Keith Croze. Chambers then called maintenance and Katie Voigt, head of housekeeping. Finally Chambers returned to Sutcliffe. With water up to his knees, he started raking leaves and bark dust from the drain in the center of the parking lot.

"The parking lot drained almost 2 feet of water to almost nothing in two minutes," Chambers said.

Just after 8 a.m., maintenance workers arrived as well as Mike Lanagan, Chambers' relief. Lanagan walked to the library and discovered another mess.

"The best I know is the sewer flooded through the toilets," Miss Voigt said. "It's pretty nasty stuff. We found sewer water in the elevator shaft." She said that because the bathroom doors were closed, water was about 6 inches deep in the bathrooms.

In addition to the bathrooms, the backup also came through the floor drains in the custodial closet.

"We probably had between 30 and 40 students help out after they came back from church," Miss Voigt said. "They stayed and worked as much as they could, and some stayed until when we stopped, a little past 6."

Ryan Samples, the RD who gathered the work crew, said, "After lunch, it wasn't flooded; it was more backed up from the drains and the urinals, so it coated everything. The bathrooms were coated with black stuff."

"For them to be there was such a blessing. We wouldn't have been able to get as much done as we did," Miss Voigt said.

Miss Voigt said Multnomah had to replace all the carpets in most of the lower floor of the library. Carpet layers replaced the carpet in L110, in L101, in the lobby, in the lower stack and in ISD.