It started out as a major hail storm. These things were as big as quarters. I get to spy on all my tenants as I'm making dinner because of my view from my kitchen window and you could tell that some of them, when they got hit with the hail, that it hurt but that did not deter them. Then it was intense rain for about 45 mins. Austin and I actually experienced something like this last summer when we didn't house any tenants but it stopped right before it hit the main parking lot area so we didn't think it was doing much damage until we get knocks on our doors saying that their basement is flooding. Oops. Should have been more on top of that. Austin and I frantically searched for buckets, sand bags, shot vacs, anything. But within a matter of about 5-10 mins I had people asked how to help and such. I honestly didn't know where to start. One of the other managers has this dominant personality and is a go-getter so I'm grateful she didn't have the stress of flooding at her complex to come help and basically tell everyone else what to do while I was fixing other things. We had to get the girls from the basement apartment of Webster House into one of my empty apartments at Carriage (another un for seen blessing from not filling this semester) and within about 20 mins we got ALL of their stuff out of the apartment. It was because kids everywhere formed a line from their apartment to the Carriage House apartment and passed along their goods. I wanted to cry. It was such a relief!
Other apartments got hit pretty bad like the complex next door, Birch Plaza, which I lived in 2 years ago. Their whole bottom floor was toast. I lived on the bottom floor when I was there and can't imagine how hard that would be. I heard one girl, who lived in a Birch aparment, who also works at the library, say that her and her roommates went to go buy pillows at Wal-mart but all those nice people bought out all the pillows to donate! You can YouTube to see videos of all the rain that rushed through campus. It's interesting that only our section of Rexburg got flooded. Even while you're on the highway just a mile away there was nothing. I told Austin it was the Lord's way of humbling us. I sometimes think (myself included) that we're a little too entitled and expect everything to be just how we like it. Maybe I've just noticed that more from a manager's standpoint.
But with every tragedy comes a blessing and certainly the "Spirit of Ricks" was alive and well that day. It's always neat to hear the stories of miracles afterwards. Pres. Clark gave a devotional during Education Week that we got to attend and he showed a video of the flood and of the aftermath and clean up that went on. Then he shared a great story about a local Bishop who had 30 homes affected by the flood. He was on the phone with his Stake President giving him a report. "President, I just don't know what to do." Then the Bishop had the impression, "angels are coming." He looked out his window and saw about 100 BYU-I students were coming up the street with buckets to help. He gets back on the phone and says, "never mind, we're going to be okay."
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