Last week on Tuesday, Sept. 25, Grosse Pointe experienced major storms, and with this came heavy rainfall and flooding outside and inside South. Water had seeped into classrooms and the basement along with a few students’ lockers.

“We had approximately 21 areas where water had come in,” principal Moussa Hamka said. “Some of that resulted in damaged ceiling tiles, wet carpet and the walls becoming wet and damaging the plaster and drywall.” The school custodians were on the job of cleaning up the flooding and damaged areas as soon as they could to make sure the school was ready for the day.

“We had to get sucker machines, we had to disinfect the whole entire rooms and we had to pull everything out of the rooms,” South custodian Scarlett Greet said.

Hamka said that some of the water had even seeped into a few of the teachers’ classrooms.

“We had a bit of water on the floor,” South teacher Elizabeth Lulis said. “I’m next to one of the drain pipes and sometimes it can overflood, especially if the trap is filled, which happened yesterday.”

According to Lulis, there was no major damage to her classroom.

“(The damage) was really minor this year and cleaned up quickly,” Lulis said. “It didn’t really impact any of our technology. We just had to be mindful that we weren’t putting our backpacks down on the floor.”

According to Hamka, aside from classrooms, there was some major damage that hit the basement.

“We did have the basement of the IA flood and there’s a computer lab that is down in that area,” Hamka said. “There is also a small engines room that did fill up with a few inches of water.”

However, not only classrooms and the basement felt the hit of the floods, a few of the students’ lockers were also damaged Hamka said.

“I went to to get my stuff from my locker and there was just a huge puddle in front of my locker,” Raven Whittenburg ’20 said.

According to Hamka, the school brought in a flood restoration company to assist in cleaning up and taking care of the water damage around the school.

“We’ve certainly fixed some of the leaks, put a new slate roof on, but there’s so many other areas of the building that need to be addressed with a new roof,” Hamka said.

There is still much to be done around the school regarding the recent flooding, nonetheless the school is on top of taking care of everything Hamka said.

“We’ve certainly fixed some of the leaks, put a new slate roof on, but there’s so many other areas of the building that need to be addressed with a new roof and wall caps,” Hamka said “Hopefully if the bond passes, these are items we can begin to rectify.”