"That's something you don't see every day in Dublin 4." The speaker, Dermott Bolger, pointed to the dinghy travelling slowly from house to house in Stella Gardens in Ringsend making sure nobody was left inside.
Roads, gardens and ground floors were submerged from the earlier sudden flooding brought on by a combination of an incoming tide and heavy rainfall.
It was now only six in the evening but it seemed far later with no houselights or streetlights since the electricity had been cut as a safety precaution.
One householder, Angela, pointed ruefully to the car she had bought three weeks ago. Only the roof could be seen above the water.Another, Marie Leonard, pointed to the house she had moved into recently after having it gutted and renovated inside. "At least we know what it'll cost to do it again," she said.
Dermott Bolger had appeared out of the waist-high water with a cat, Scooby, whom he had gone back to rescue. "We've rescued him once from the cat-and-dog home and now we've had to rescue him again," said Ms Leonard.
A little further along, another animal rescue: householder Kevin Cosgrave struggled through the water with his dog Jack over his shoulder.
Once on dry ground, Jack dashed happily towards the Dodder and had to be hauled back: a short time earlier, part of the wide walkway along the river had collapsed.
Clanna Gael Fontenoy GAA club had planned a special evening to launch its draw. Instead it became the designated centre for people needing help as a result of the flooding.
Inside, Ms Doreen Huntley was waiting for a friend to call. "Everything was lovely," she said of the events of the afternoon, "and then a neighbour knocked on the door and said the water had overflowed its banks. Then the water started coming in the hall door. It was moving the chairs and moving the beds."
She was rescued in a dinghy. "We got a right lash - water got into the boats and everything."
In her 23 years in Stella Gardens she has never known flooding like this.
She has been in this situation before, though, from the other side. As a teenage member of the Red Cross she was involved in a rescue effort when the Shannon overflowed its banks in Athlone in the late 1950s.
This has, however, happened before in Stella Gardens, according to Jimmy Doyle. He says it happened in January 1925, six weeks before he was born.