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| My friend, Greg, reminded me that "Loup" is French for "wolf." So here's my current mascot. |
Anyone watching the news today knows that there is a massive storm covering the entire width of the middle of the U.S., and sure enough this weather has become truly historic. Earlier this month I mused about how the fluffy snowflakes tickling my nose made me appreciate the winter weather I had missed for so many years. Well, those big fluffy flakes of frozen water are not as sweetly romantic when they are blowing horizontally across the sky, or covering the layer of ice under your feet. When the city of St. Louis has activated the National Guard to assist with a weather emergency, you know something else is up.
Monday, January 31: the last day of my Birthday Month. And it was a day at work like none other I have ever experienced. I spent the better part of 5 hours in a suddenly truncated 6-hour workday in various combinations of emergency response and disaster preparedness meetings. A university representative had attended a meeting downtown with the city, the National Weather Service, and organizations that are now new acronyms in my vocabulary: MODOT ("moe-dot," the Missouri Department of Transportation) and IDOT ("eye-dot," the Illinois Department of Transportation, not some new cute gadget from Apple). Various offices on campus coordinated efforts to consolidate food and water into minimal dining hall operations, cots were moved into the Rec Center for emergency shelter, dining services staff were put up in a local hotel to be able to come back and prepare/serve food, public safety officers were assigned some on-campus apartment spaces we identified to stay overnight on campus, a broadcast message to the campus was sent out, and I helped write the follow-up message to students (which included a strong request for all students from the local area to go home and bring friends with them, if possible, so we could minimize the human footprint on campus). All non-essential staff would be sent home and all classes were canceled from 4 PM on Monday through Tuesday. When I started working here in December, I was told that the university never shuts down because of weather, and that's just the way it is. So history was made: classes were canceled, and for over a day in advance. And because I am still in my temporary apartment comfortably close to the campus, I became one of the most senior administrators who might be able to respond in person to the campus, in the event of any major crisis. Why hello there, Second Month On The Job, how are you? At least it's good to know that I'm not exactly "non-essential." The roads were predicted to be impassable at a certain point in this storm. In fact, the weather forecasts announced that some time on Tuesday February 1, any salt or chemical treatments on the roads and sidewalks would simply "cease to be effective." In addition to MODOT and IDOT, here are some other fun terms I have learned and heard a lot in the last 48 hours: thundersnow, thundersleet, deteriorating forecast, ice accumulation, "hunker down," blizzard warning, and white-out conditions.
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| Entrance gate to my temporary apartment building: big snowflakes blowing in strong winds, icicles on fence, and ice under snow on the ground. I'm staying indoors, as much as I can, thank you very much! |
Tuesday, February 1: a strangely quiet day. I checked in with staff members periodically and for the most part, the campus is calm. The roads stayed mostly empty; airlines canceled over 300 flights at Lambert. About midday, I hit weather-news-overload and had to switch to streaming Netflix and homework reading. I mean, when the constant message from the news is "Stay off the roads after 12 noon and just get to where you need to be to stay indoors and hunker down and ride out this storm," there's not much else to do. The weather deteriorated all day, with temperatures dropping, ice accumulating, and winds gusting. By late afternoon, the highway I drove on just two months ago to get here, I-70, was completely shut down in the state: all traffic was stopped from Kansas City to St. Louis. Around that time, I got a call from my supervisor to tell me that all the VPs had conference-called and (I think, smartly) decided to keep the university closed for a second full day, tomorrow February 2. Oh hello there, Groundhog Day. Do yourself a favor, Punxsutawney Phil: stay well underground because it's nasty up here above ground! Everyone is just hoping that the ice accumulation and strong winds tonight and tomorrow will not result in downed power lines or cause power outages on campus. If we do get the privilege of uninterrupted power, I'll spend some time tomorrow on the laptop and on WiFi rearranging my calendar to make up for the lost days and will try to get work done remotely.
So let's hope that we will all be able to say we rode out this storm by the end of the week. I'm hopeful that St. Louis University will recover and get back to normal business soon, and in all likelihood that will happen faster than the rest of the city of St. Louis. In the meantime, I'm happy to stay hunkered down. Having already survived the elements in "Snowpocalypse 2010" (the late December 2010 blizzard in New York City), I am confident I will survive "St. Loupocalypse 2011," which is my newest mayor-ship on FourSquare - ha!
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| Feeling like this solitary tree: steadfastly facing winter's worst, hoping for the best! |
More hot chocolate, please...
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