NIU President John Peters addressed Wednesday how NIU handled the flooding during move-in day at University Council.

Peters discussed the flood and thanked students, staff and emergency crews for their efforts.

“What a colossally difficult start,” Peters said. “But we’re here. We’re high and dry and we’re running.”

Students offered their aid by helping with sandbagging across campus.

“Our students don’t get enough credit for how they help out this community,” Peters said. “That was one of their finest hours.”

When Staff Meteorologist Gilbert Sebenste informed the university about the oncoming storm, NIU immediately shut down operations, Peters said.

Because the bridges in DeKalb were closed and normal operations were not necessary, NIU immediately shut down in order to get people who did not need to be there out, Peters said.

“The big issue for us was that the Lucinda [electrical] substation, which supplies to power to that part of campus, was taken out and we had to locate a substation.” Peters said.

Peters described the problem of losing the substation as plugging in all appliances in a room in to a single power strip to keep functioning.

Around 300 emergency critical personal were on hand which were necessary to keep physical plant and dorms operational, Peters said.

NIU already had a solution in place in the event of an outage with an electrical substation, however the state has not yet released the promised money yet, Peters said.

Peters also commented on new students’ impressions after an out of the ordinary move-in experience.

“Our new students will always remember their first week,” Peters said.