As a new school year and the familiar hum of campus life on College Hill begin, students in southern Louisiana - including Brown alums starting their graduate studies - had their first week of classes quickly cut off by the arrival of Hurricane Gustav.
Joshua Teitelbaum '08 started law school at Tulane University in New Orleans on Monday, Aug. 25. By Aug. 28, he was on a plane back to his home in New York.
"Originally a lot of us were going to try to wait it out," Teitelbaum said. "When they first were closing the school ... a lot of the locals said, 'Why don't you just wait and see?'"
But by Friday that didn't seem like a good idea, he said. "Stores started to run out of things and were closing without notice."
Tulane and more than half-a-dozen other schools in Louisiana, including Xavier University of Louisiana and Southern University-New Orleans, suspended classes towards the end of last week to allow students to prepare to evacuate, according to U.S. News and World Report. A mandatory evacuation order was then issued by the city instructing all residents of New Orleans to evacuate by noon on Saturday.
"A lot of people were nervous because they didn't know when the evacuation would get ordered," Teitelbaum said. "They want to stay as long as they can but they don't want to get stuck."
Prior to the storm's landfall on Monday, forecasters predicted that it would remain at least a Category 3 hurricane. By the time it reached the Gulf Coast it was a Category 2 hurricane and four hours later dropped to Category 1. By Tuesday the storm again dropped to a tropical depression as it continued inland.
"A lot of students started to panic and worry about what to do, especially those of us that are from far away and/or don't know anyone in nearby states," wrote Sandra Valenciano '08, a first-year graduate student at Tulane studying for a master's in public health, in a message to The Herald.
If students were unable to make their own evacuation plans, Tulane provided a bus to take them to a shelter at Jackson State University in Mississippi. The majority of students were able to find their own accommodation with friends in neighboring states, according to Teitelbaum. Valenciano and two of her friends were able to drive to a classmate's parent's hunting camp in Port Gibson, Miss.
"We all packed in case of a worst case scenario. ... We tried to bring as much as we could fit in my car in case we couldn't return to the city," Valenciano wrote. The drive - which Valenciano said normally takes three-and-a-half hours - took six hours.
Teitelbaum took a flight to New York. "When I left the airport was kind of crazy," he said. "All the parking lots were full so a bunch of us made our own parking spots."
Schools north of New Orleans were also affected by the hurricane. Though there was no mandatory evacuation, Baton Rouge - about 80 miles northwest of New Orleans - was hit even harder by Hurricane Gustav than it had been by Hurricane Katrina, according to Lindsay Key, a Baton-Rouge native who, now a senior, had just started her freshman year at Louisiana State University when Katrina hit. Key and her roommates decided not to evacuate when Gustav hit Monday because their families live nearby.
Before Gustav had arrived and Baton Rouge was under a hurricane warning, the power still worked in Key's house at school.
"We were watching the Weather Channel and we knew it was going to be bad," she said. "We hunkered down in the hallway, away from the windows," Key said, adding that electricity went out around noon on Monday.
On her radio, Key heard that the winds outside were up to 90 miles per hour.
After the storm had passed - and broken a window in one of the house's bedrooms - Key and her roommates drove to her parents' house. "Right now a lot of stores are closed or don't have power. ... A lot of roads are blocked from trees, so I doubt I could even get to campus," Key said.
Classes at LSU are currently scheduled to resume Thursday, but that date may change as damage is assessed.
The mayor of New Orleans has announced that residents will most likely be allowed to return on Thursday. Tulane had originally planned to start classes Thursday but then postponed them until Monday.
Tulane's Emergency Notice Web site announced Tuesday morning that there was no major damage or flooding on either of their campuses in New Orleans. Xavier also plans to resume classes on Monday, according to a campus advisory released on the school's Web site.
"The possibility of another Hurricane Katrina was stressful, especially given that the three year anniversary was this past Friday and it still appears to be a fresh wound among locals," Valenciano wrote.
Valenciano said she may go back to school on Friday morning. "I think (Tulane) did a great job of preparing students. They made sure that we had an evacuation plan, had the emergency Web site up to date, sent us e-mails, sent us text messages," Valenciano wrote. "One of my professors even called me to ask me what my evacuation plans were."
