A woman looks up from her crossword. At the other end of the train, fellow passengers are jumping back from water gushing through the ceiling of a Clarendon-bound Metro train.

It’s one of those photos that has the luminosity and proportions of an accidental Renaissance painting, and it had more than one person wondering as it got shared around on social media: did it really happen?

Happen it did, says Xiao Liu, who took the photo and a short video of water streaming down the aisle, pooling around the ankles of befuddled riders.

Liu was commuting from her home in Fairfax when her train was fated to pass under the waterfall that appeared in the Virginia Square Metro station shortly before 9 a.m. last Monday morning.

The gushing water lasted about 20 minutes, Metro spokesperson Dan Stessel told DCist. He said that the large volume of rainfall exceeded the capacity of the surface-level drainage system, resulting in the leak, but inspectors found no outstanding structural issues.

Liu says she was having an otherwise normal commute, aside from the morning’s surprising darkness ahead of the torrential rainfall. When the water came pouring in to her Orange Line train, Liu says she largely stayed dry, since she was standing further away, and her first instinct was to grab her phone to document the surprising intrusion.

“It was just unbelievable, everyone was just shocked,” she said.

The drama of the photo is in the initial torrent of water, but Liu says leakage was coming from the entire ceiling. She worried about the potential danger if there had also been electrical issues, and hopes the intrusion into the roof doesn’t represent some flaw in the 7000-series trains. (They are Metro’s newest cars and did at one point have a wiring issue that has since been fixed).

The deluge intruding into a passenger car of a 7000-series train was an “extremely rare” occurrence and the cars are designed to handle exposure to water, Metro spokesperson Sherri Ly told DCist over email.

“It appears that the water entered the car through the fresh air intake of the HVAC system which is mounted on the roof of 7000-series vehicles,” Ly said. “In normal or heavy rainfall, any water is diverted through ducts and exits the car through drains. At Virginia Square, the sudden deluge of water falling directly into the fresh air intake was more than the car could divert, resulting in water entering the cabin.”

In response to safety concerns, she noted that wiring is enclosed in secure boxes or run on the underside of the car, and each car “undergoes rigorous ‘water tightness testing.'”

The train was just seconds away from the station, so it couldn’t be rerouted, Ly said, adding that only one car got drenched inside and the trains that followed were able to go around the internal waterfall using the other track.

The train was eventually taken out of service and inspected. But when it stopped at the next station, Liu says she hopped off and boarded another car, leaving the sodden mess behind.