Hurricane Gustav from a Student's POV
Thursday, September 4, 2008 by Kelly Sutton I caught up with a HackCollege reader just as she was fleeing New Orleans last week from Hurricane Gustav after she asked a question about reading assignments out of Google Book Search. Little did she know, she was about to get interviewed. The following is an edited email interview with fellow student Chelsea Mansulich.
HC: What school do you attend?
CM: I attend Loyola University New Orleans. I am from a suburb of Atlanta and I had no connections to New Orleans prior to attending college there.
HC: What year are you and what do you study?
CM: I am a junior. I am an Economics major with minors in Arabic and French. Other specialties include nerdiness and gleaning obscure facts about New Orleans.
HC: When did you receive the order to evacuate for Hurricane Gustav?
CM: Loyola students began talking about the Hurricane as of last Wednesday, August 27th; the majority of my professors conducted lectures in a general haze. They asked us about our Gustav plans and made sure that we all had somewhere to go.
The hurricane was the only thing on anyone's mind. On Wednesday, if you were to stand at the back of a classroom and look at what students were doing on their laptops you would find them: hastily emailing their parents and friends, finalizing their hurricane evacuation plans on our online records service, updating their facebook status regarding what city they would go to and if they had car space for people to join them, google mapping evacuation routes, looking at contraflow maps, and obsessively looking at local newspapers...
Loyola students were told via email, a call to our cell phones, and by a banner on loyno.edu that they must be evacuated by Saturday (8/30) at 9 am. Also, the school began distributing Evacuation pamphlets that were printed by the state of Louisiana. We were told that the University would cease operations as of noon on Saturday; thus, every building locked and made into a ghost town. I left Friday morning at 4 in the morning for Dallas in order to avoid heinous traffic...
HC: How does the preparation for Gustav differ from the preparation for Katrina? Did you school take any extra precautions?
CM: I must admit, I was not in New Orleans for Katrina. However, there are several ways that preparation differed. We all filed our evacuation plans with the university; similar to filing immunization records. [Louisiana] had a better plan in place: the state would evacuate in tiers so that the traffic flow would be more efficient. Everyone knew in advance that it was coming. We were updated every 6 hours or so on the university's plans in regards to evacuation and classes by emails, banners across the University's home page, and calls to our cellphones. After Katrina, Loyola invested an absorbent amount of money on access to a state-of-the-art hurricane prediction website...
On a student level, students that went through Katrina tagged people in facebook notes about the lessons that they learned about Katrina. We were told things like: don't forget to clean out your refrigerator, cell phones networks cease to work during evacuations due to the mass amount of calls but you will probably be able to text message, bring your lease and a current power bill for proof of residency so that you will be allowed to re-enter the city as soon as authorities will let you do so, ducktape your windows if you live off campus, etc
HC: You said your professors were still conducting class through Blackboard and other online methods. How do you feel about this? Do you think class should continue during a hurricane?
CM: I have mixed feelings about my professors conducting online classes. Honestly, our university did it as a means to keep enrollment. After Katrina, many insurance companies claimed that people prematurely evacuated for it (clearly this is absurdity). Thus, the idea of Blackboard seems to be a pragmatic way to keep enrollment and that much needed sense of normalcy. However, most people that use Blackboard will agree that it is, at best, mediocre software. Blackboard just happens to have a strong hold on the market.
I more or less feel accosted every time I use Blackboard so I have dreaded logging into it each day.
HC: Are all professors required to continue class during a hurricane, or is it just optional?
CM: All professors, in theory, are required to continue classes. As students at Loyola we have an obligation to log in to Blackboard within 48 hours of an evacuation. In our syllabi, our professors write about the school's Hurricane policy and theirs respectively... In order for the university to keep its accreditation we must attend class a certain number of days a year. In the face of a hurricane, the school resorts to Blackboard as a means of continuing class so that we do not have to tack on extra days at the end of the year. Or possibly worse: have our Mardi Gras break eliminated.
HC: You mentioned something about your friend having "MacGyvered" a webcam looking outside of his window. What was the inspiration for this?
CM: My friend's inspiration was a mixture of things. Not to sound cliched, or like every bad CNN newsreel you saw about Gustav, a significant amount of inspiration was simply desperation. We knew that if another hurricane hit we would not be able to see the conditions of our homes for quite a while. Possibly months before we were allowed to re-enter. Although Gustav was only a category 2 at landfall, we will only be allowed to enter our city as of Thursday (as in today). We still do not know if the homes we return to will have power.
The hardest part about evacuation is the uncertainty. Everyone wonders if and when their lives will return to normalcy. We knew we would see our friends again, but when we would see them was the question. When I was in the process of evacuating, for the first 5 hours of the drive, I watched several national guard convoys head towards New Orleans, as well as fire brigades, police cars, and school buses (the city's evacuation plan was for people to evacuate via school buses. The school bus would drive through their neighborhood blaring a siren and at that point it was their duty to get on the bus). While we all were preparing for an evacuation and saw officials prepare we were unsure of when it would be official.
The webcam, as cheesy as this might come across in print, provided everyone who knew about it a sense of certainty. We looked at it online to see if it was raining, if the power was out, and to have knowledge of what was occurring in the place that we were forced to leave.
HC: Anything else that you'd like to add?
CM: The New Orleans that I know is not the New Orleans that you know due to a travesty of irresponsible media coverage during and after Katrina as well as Gustav. When I am traveling outside of NoLa and people ask me where I attend college their response typically involves "How is the city post hurricane Katrina?". Sometimes, people ask me if it is still flooded, and I imagine a large part of their ignorance is due to the media's lack of coverage on New Orleans rebuilding post Katrina. I typically smile to this question and coyly answer "Yes, I actually take a boat in order to attend class."
There is more to New Orleans than Mardi Gras, Bourbon Street, the French Quarter, and alcohol consumption. While all of the aforementioned are noble pursuits- the city has so much more to offer. However, tourists who only spend time in the touristy area of Bourbon Street would never be familiar with anything more.
Whether it is Katrina, Gustav, or even Ike the question of rebuilding ought to never be a question again. New Orleans ability to thrive and subsist effects your lifestyle.
Do you attend school in the Southeast? How did you evacuate for the storm? For those not in the Southeast, what has news coverage of the storm been like on your own campus? Let us know in the comments!
Reader Comments (4)
Whoa, crazy!
people will always be in the area rebuilding if the hurricanes continue to tear stuff down.
My name is Jimmy and I am a Computer Science major at the University of New Orleans. I grew up in New Orleans, and evacuating for hurricanes up until Katrina was just something you dealt with, sometimes with no sort of preparation. People used to have Hurricane parties and such.
Anyways I went through Katrina, although my house was not flooded, the roof was blown to pieces, and the entire inside of my house was rained on, I didn't get to move back into my house until a little less than a year ago. Needless to say, having a Katrina-like storm coming on nearly the third anniversary of Katrina was more than stressful, for a number of reasons. First, I only just moved back into my house. Second and more importantly were the state of the levees and drainage system. Parts of New Orleans still flood a few inches in the streets and things, because the drains have still not been cleaned since Katrina.
On top of that,the levees were not finished, and the goal is only to prevent Category 3 storm surges. The problem with this is that when a Category 5 storm moves toward the gulf and downgrades, it still carries whatever category storm surge. So if a category 3 storm hits, we could still be flooded because the surge is still at a cat 4 or 5 level. Combine this fact with the fact that the levees weren't finished, and you have a recipe for disaster. The way they justify this plan though is that levees are supposed to protect property not people. I'm still not sure I agree with this idea completely. It feels to me though that they are just making excuses. The government has had 3 years to fix this mess, and they wasted so much time arguing. The time they spent arguing they could have been fixing the problem. Its literally the most disheartening thing about living here for me: I may never be confident that my property will be safe, because this protection does not seem to be a priority to any level of government. They're more concerned with whose getting money and how.
Anyway, the evacuation of course was much smoother than that of Katrina (they couldn't afford to screw that up twice). I personally drove to Oklahoma with my family the day before they issued the contra-flow out of the city. So I encountered little or no traffic on the way out.
While in Oklahoma, the thing that bothered me the most was the media coverage of national news agencies like Fox and CNN when it came to covering press conferences with Governor Bobby Jindal. They would show maybe 2 minutes of the conference, and then silence it to talk about some other useless news story, or cut to commercial. Meanwhile, I along with other Louisianians are missing very important information with regard to our homes and also when we could possibly return. I had to get on the internet and stream WWL 870 (local news station) just hear the conference. I guess important information about evacuees homes isn't "juicy" enough for today's "infotainment" broadcasters.
Even though the evacuation was successful, the news agencies conveniently left out a very important fact when comparing the evacuation of Gustav to Katrina: New Orleans population is still less than half that of the population before Katrina hit. So they had a lot less people to manage. Don't get me wrong..I am grateful and I honestly do think they did a good job with busing evacuees and such. I just like to keep things in perspective.
The only other problem I saw with the news coverage was the fact that all the news broadcaster focused on New Orleans when places west and south of us were damaged far worse than New Orleans. I dont' think enough awareness is being brought about for these areas of the state.
I'm not really sure how coherent this post was, but I would still like to add one more thing. The city keeps talking about rebuilding and bringing people back, but the way they're doing things is accomplishing just the opposite. If you remember, after katrina, we lost so much of the population. So of course, the city has lost a great sum in tax dollars. So what they've done to make up the cost, is to raise the taxes, specifically property taxes of everyone who decided to stay and rebuild. So now the current situation in New Orleans for the average citizen: He owns a house, which he has yet to recieve money for from the Road Home Program, property values have dropped substantially, and taxes are being raised.
As much as I love the city of New Orleans, a substantial amount of work has to be done, and drastic rethinking of the policies here needs to be accomplished to actually get people back into the city. The current situation has made me anything but optimistic. I have lived here for 21 years now, but I have already decided to leave this year after I graduate. The government officials have made me way to disheartened and not at all confident in the future of the city. -- Jim
I hope the rebuilding process generates stronger homes. Not just the conventional stick houses