Sophomore Craig Reid was just getting to the good part of the movie at 1:40 a.m. Sunday when he heard the sound of gushing water. He looked outside the room in Terrace 9 and saw a sprinkler head spraying water in the hallway.

He ran through the downpour to get to his own room. He woke up his sleeping roommate, sophomore Matt McLaughlin, and the two stuffed towels and bed sheets under the door to stop the floodwaters.

“I tell him, ‘Matt! T9’s gonna go under!’” Reid said. “‘We need to get towels, quickly! Barricade the door and everything!’”

When the fire alarm sounded and Campus Safety officers arrived minutes later, water was still pouring into the hallway at a rate of 25 gallons per second. Officers determined someone had tampered with the sprinklers, causing the flood.

By the time the system was shut down, more than 200 gallons of water had flooded the floor. Resident Assistant Thom Furey said the college would not charge residents for the damages.

Reid said the water in the hallway was almost ankle deep when he was forced to evacuate the building.

“We were wondering why this happened on a Saturday night,” Reid said. “Everything seemed quiet in the Terrace, and now this.”

Investigator Thomas Dunn said it took him more than 10 minutes to shut the sprinkler off. Dunn said the water leaked through lighting fixtures to affect students on the first floor.

“The building was literally dripping,” Dunn said. Dunn said the Office of Public Safety is looking for the perpetrators. There had been other incidents with sprinklers going off inside residence halls, he said. In April 2004, a sprinkler discharged inside a room in Emerson Hall.

Furey said he lost two textbooks and a binder of musical compositions in the flood.

“You could hear it all throughout the building,” Furey said. “When students were evacuating, they were coming out with umbrellas.”

Furey said students in T9 have bonded as a result of the sprinkler incident and now display “I survived the flood of ’06” on their doors.

In 2005, 28 cases of students “maliciously tampering” with fire-safety equipment were reported.

Fire sprinklers are heat-activated devices. Once the liquid-filled glass bulb is heated to 165 degrees Fahrenheit, the bulb will shatter and release water from the pipes.

Sophomore Ryan Chatterton lost more than $300 worth of textbooks, and the power source to his computer was destroyed.

“I was speechless,” he said. “I didn’t know what to do, it was totally unexpected,” he said.