A heavy rainstorm that shocked Seattle last week is still having a lasting impact on Seattle Pacific University— specifically Royal Brougham Pavilion.

On Wednesday, Sept. 23 a heavy rainstorm hit the city of Seattle and caused flooding around the SPU campus. Following the flooding, SPU Facilities have been working on cleaning up the areas affected by the flood.

The storm had an effect on different parts of the gym, with some parts of the gym receiving a few inches of water and some parts not receiving any water at all.

“The rooms on the east and south and west side of the basement that are adjacent or closer to Nickerson and Third Avenue West, they got an inch or two of water inside, maybe three. The spaces on the north side, closest to the canal, like the crew house and the health and human performance lab, those spaces probably had a foot and a half of water in them ,” stated David Church, the Assistant Vice President of SPU Facilities Management.

The upper level of the gym seemed to have gotten the worst of the storm and the two lower levels didn’t receive the same outcome.

“The center of the basement is made up of a series of locker rooms and probably 90 percent of the basement. There’s a racetrack hallway around the interior and in the center there’s a bunch of locker rooms and storage rooms, the cage, stuff like that. None of that was impacted. There was no water in the basement,” stated Church.

With the severe degree of flooding that the gym received, water had to have entered the building from multiple places

“So the source of the water was certainly surface run off from the rain, but also the source of the water was water popping up from manhole covers on city streets and water popping up out of basically the city sanitary sewage system,” stated Church

Seattle pipelines were not able to hold the excessive amounts of water, causing the view of the streets near SPU to display similarities to a river.

Now that everything is evaluated, it’s time to take the next steps towards clean-up. SPU facilities have been working to repair the damages that the upper level of the gym has received.

“So the first thing we do is, we are trying to suck up the water to get the flooding under control. As we’re doing that, we reach out to an industrial hygiene firm and they come in and they help guide our steps,” stated Church.

“We have to not only have to clean the water up off the floor, but we have to remove any building materials that became wet, like … sheet rock, like water got underneath flooring. We take all of that out,” stated Church.

Royal Brougham was closed over the past week due to the damage, but that hasn’t stopped athletes that use Royal Brougham from practicing.

“We started on Wallace field on tuesday. The workouts have been more cardio based which have been more challenging,” stated volleyball senior Maddie Batiste.

Even though the workouts on Wallace field are different from the workouts that are done in Royal Brougham, the women’s team is not letting anything stop them from being ready for the spring season.

“We had a positive morale going into the workouts this week,” stated Batiste.

Despite the changes that the women’s team has experienced this season and this past week, the team is ready to get back to working in Royal Brougham on Tuesday Oct. 6.