Imagine a student standing over a toilet, cutting her hair and flushing it down the drain.

Whether she was cutting her own hair or a friend was helping, the result was a flood Thursday night on the second floor of Centennial Halls north forcing students to abandon their rooms.

However, not all was lost as some students took the opportunity to wade barefoot through the water and take some pictures of the scene.

Maintenance man Lance Price, who was working the late shift fixing a leaky pipe in the Village Commons, received an emergency call to repair a flood in Centennial Halls.

After running back to the shop to grab some wet vacuums, he arrived at Halls to discover that a ball of long black hair was clogging the drain. The clog forced all the water which was being flushed down the drains from floors two and up in the north tower to gush out at the point of the clog and flood the second floor.

The smell was the worst part about trying to fix the flood, said Price. “It was like someone cut a bunch of long hair and started flushing.”

The main pipes are six inches in diameter so chances are that the hair did not accumulate over time, but was all flushed down in a matter of hours.

One room was almost totally trashed with the tile almost completely gone on the first floor ceiling above that room, said Price.

Despite the smell and damage, it was hard to keep students away.

The custodial staff is reporting that residents eventually returned to their rooms.

It was a total shock to Laura Johnson, a resident of two north. “All the hallways are wet and the bathroom is disgusting,” said Johnson. To make matters worse for Johnson, men decided to shampoo the rug in the rooms early Friday morning waking residents. Johnson also concedes that the worst part about the flood was the smell from used water.

The flood affected approximately half the rooms on the second floor, said Denise Kupetz, the graduate resident director who was on duty at the time of the flood.

By the time Kupetz arrived on the scene, most of the residence had already placed towels in the doorways of the rooms to keep water from getting in their rooms. Residents were utilizing trash cans and mops to pick up as much water from the floor as possible. After about two and a half hours of clean up, only the industrial fans were still running to remind residents of the flood