Late in the afternoon, Randy Dymond sat in his office on the second floor of Patton Hall and saw a torrential downpour outside. The rain came fast and heavy. It pooled, quickly.
Across campus at the corner of West Campus Drive and Duck Pond Drive, Dymond knew a small section of Blacksburg’s Stroubles Creek would easily overflow from water runoff. His computer verified that hunch as a monitoring and camera system at the creek sent back data — the water was far deeper than normal and moving fast.