University History - 1997 Flood

Faculty Move On

Published July 2007

Damage to faculty and staff offices presented another problem requiring immediate attention. In Eddy Hall, for example, the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures had been so severely damaged that they had to be relocated in order to function by the start of fall semester.

Workers move books from Eddy building

Worker quickly work to salvage what they can from flooded offices in the Eddy Building.

Sara Saz, new chairwoman of the latter department, was in the process of moving to Colorado from Bloomington, Indiana, when she learned of the flood. Arriving in Fort Collins on August 2, a far greater challenge confronted her. More than fifty faculty and staff had to be moved, and quickly.

"I spent my first week in a small room in the anthropology office," she said. "There were no records except those in the dean’s office. We had no phones or computers, and we made do with cell phones. It was very basic for the first few weeks."

Most of the department was moved to the General Services Building, along the railroad tracks west of Jack Christiansen Field, while the language laboratory and graduate teaching assistant offices were placed in the Clark Building east of the library.

Remarkable initiative

This relocation succeeded largely because of associate dean Bob Hoffert’s remarkable initiative. After negotiating the loan of office dividers from the Fort Collins branch of the Hewlett Packard Company, he and his wife Maureen spent an entire Sunday assembling this equipment at the General Services and the University Services buildings. As a result the Foreign Languages and Literatures, and Philosophy departments had functioning offices in time for the beginning of fall semester.

Countless stories of determination characterized the days following the flood. Bob Richburg, director of honored Project Promise intensive-teacher training program, coped by placing a small sign labeled "Mt. Devastation" atop a pile of ruined teaching and research materials hauled from the Education Building. More significant, however, were the twenty-three phone calls that he had received by 5 p.m. the day after the flood from former students offering help.

More about the flood

Historical accounts in this series of articles, were compiled and edited from Democracy's University - A History of Colorado State University 1970-2003, written by James E. Hansen II (University Press of Colorado, 2007).

To order a book, call (970) 491-6198, e-mail Resource.Center@ucm.colostate.edu or visit 115 General Services Building on Colorado State’s main campus. Cost is $27, not including tax or shipping. The books are also available at the CSU Bookstore in the Lory Student Center.