Student life goes on despite Hurricane Matthew

While Hurricane Matthew swept across North Carolina, UNC campuses had to find ways to keep students safe.

UNC-Wilmington cancelled classes at 5 p.m. Wednesday and told on-campus students to evacuate the campus by noon on Thursday.

Elizabeth Heglar, senior at UNC-W, said thousands of residents in the Wilmington area are without power.

“We are now in the beginning stages of what is sure to be a very wet weekend,” Heglar said Friday.

UNC-W news confirmed Sunday that students will be permitted to return to residence halls beginning at noon today. Classes will resume and campus will reopen for employees on Tuesday.

Although Chapel Hill wasn’t hit as hard as other universities across the state, there are still signs of damage left behind by the hurricane, such as a large tree falling in front of Wilson Library and the flooding of the Ehringhaus Residence Hall basement..

“There weren’t any major power outages in any of the residence halls,” Taylor Bates, president of the Residence Hall Association, said. “No students or their property was impacted as far as I’m aware of.”

Bates said all resident advisers receive training before the school year starts to deal with emergency situations such as hurricanes.

“They are trained to respond to these crises,” he said. “They do a good job of remaining calm and orderly in these situations.”

According to the UNC media relations department, no one has reported any injuries related to the hurricane.

Senior Jared Williams, an office assistant in Craige Residence Hall, said he is not trained for emergency weather situations.

“I guess training would be important for these situations,” he said. “I didn’t have to handle too much response to the hurricane. I could definitely see that situation happening in the future.”

First-year Amita Bollapragada said while the harsh winds and heavy rain proved to be obstacles, much of student life on campus remained the same.

“The dining halls and all the student buildings I went to were still open,” Bollapragada said. “My friends and I ordered a pizza on Saturday night and it came pretty quickly, which was surprising.”

Bollapragada said alerts were useful during the hurricane.

“I think that UNC handled the preparedness of the situation pretty well. They sent out alerts and told us to be smart about where we are going,” Bollapragada said.

Some of the community governments on campus hosted programs on Saturday for residents staying indoors.

“They were offering lunch and breakfast so that residents wouldn’t have to leave to go to the dining halls on Saturday,” Bates said.

UNC continues to send out any weather updates through the Department of Public Safety social media pages and AlertCarolina messages.

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