#Tbt Storytime With Sarah J — My Third-Floor Dorm Room Flooded

Yesterday I was searching for some pictures and I came across this beauty!

When I attended Hawaii Pacific University back around 2003, I stayed in the dorm rooms on the island of Oahu. They were beautiful, with open common rooms -- and at the ends of each hall, instead of a solid wall, it was cinder blocks that allowed fresh air into the building. The mixture of sunshine, tropical smells and sounds was heaven. Each building was three stories containing rooms with, I believe, two or four roommates filled with students. I don't recall the name of my dormitory, but one early morning I woke up to someone in our doorway shrieking about a flood. She couldn't understand why we were still sleeping. (Um, maybe because it's like 4 a.m. or something? It was still dark outside.)

Sometime during the night a pipe had burst in one of the bathrooms on the third floor. While everyone slept, the water slowly started seeping down into everyone's bedrooms. Students had laptops on the ground and for hours the water ran. When it hit capacity the water began seeping down the walls into the second-floor bedrooms. Finally the first floor was woken up to water dripping on them, and THAT'S when people started figuring it out.

The next few hours were crazy as everyone either freaked out because their laptops and schoolwork were fried, or me in the above picture, just trying to use all my beach towels to sop up the water.

Students were using their boogie boards to ride the water down the hallways and geckos were climbing all over the walls. It was hot and sticky and crazy good fun! What a memory.