(NECN: Eileen Curran, Worcester, Mass.) - Heavy rain caused some major flooding in Worcester, Ma Thursday morning.
“Look at the car, every car the same,” said Michele Marte, an employee of the Lutco company. She and her co-workers could only watch as flood waters surrounded their cars. Up to three feet of water rushed into the company’s parking lot, leaving some workers to improvise on their footgear. One man put plastic trash bags over his shoes to walk through the parking lot.
“I think some of these vehicles aren’t going to start,” said Ken Jacobs. “People are going to get stuck here.”
People who tried to drive under a nearby bridge on Cambridge Street found out the hard way just how deep the water was.
“When I came in at 7:30am, I saw a car submerged under the railroad bridge you could see the roof, an hour later you couldn’t see roof of the car anymore,” said Lutco employee Andy Zakrawski.
Inside Lutco, there was water just about everywhere--the storage area, the loading dock.
“Right now on this well, we’re running two gasoline pumps and pumping it back out into the yard,” said John Stowe, company president.
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This was the third flood at Lutco in the past six years. The previous two caused $600 thousand dollars in damage each, but this time the company was prepared.
Workers put up flood boards at the doors, as well as sandbags. They also raised the inventory off the floor to keep it from getting damaged.
Taking no chances, the company put in some pretty expensive plumbing.
“We’ve plumbed all hard plumbing into place so that we could just connect our pumps and not have to fight it we put quick disconnects on our hoses so we didn’t have to screw it on we got we got all our priming lines in place in advance so it was just plug and play.”
Workers said the area is prone to flooding because it is a low lying area and the Blackstone canal , which brings water out to the Blackstone River, runs underneath. When it rains and the river rises, the water backs into the canal and floods the area.
