It is hard not to acknowledge this weather if you are from the South. “Milk, bread and eggs” is the joke, but like most North Carolina natives, I have little experience with extreme winter weather. It is overwhelming to visit my boyfriend’s family in Illinois in the winter because they get snow seemingly every day and it doesn’t bother them. Down here, though, it is deadly when people brave the roads and it is great the University is not taking a chance on students’ lives for the first week of classes.
Though the chancellor and the provost decide when classes are delayed, the Department of Facilities, the Department of Environmental Health and Safety and Campus Police work together to assess the campus and the surrounding area to make sure the right decision is made. The conditions were tricky during this storm and weather forecasts were constantly developing and changing, but these departments made the best decision by taking everything into account.
Sadly, we never got any snow, and the freezing rain turned Raleigh into a sheet of ice Tuesday. Cancelling classes until 12 p.m. on Tuesday was the best move the University could have done to protect its students from the conditions. About 8,000 students commute to campus every day, and 6,666 of them are from North Carolina. Before I could even commute back to campus Tuesday afternoon, I still had to use an icescraper, a tool practically unknown to North Carolina, to chisel my windows out so I could see. Braving the roads, I can only imagine what other students had to do to get to their first Tuesday class.
The University has rightfully cancelled today’s morning classes until 10 a.m. Although the N.C. Department of Transportation has had all Tuesday to clear the roads, there are still areas where students and professors are coming from that aren’t safe. The National Weather Service is predicting the sun will come out today, so the threat of ice should diminish. It is better the University is playing it safe than sorry with students’ and employees’ lives though.
It has been an atypical year of weather in the Raleigh area and who only knows what is in store for our area in the next couple months. We have missed out on a settling first week of classes, but we have the semester to figure out our classes. The one thing to remember as the semester goes on in terms of weather is: safety first. Without a safe travel and work environment, there is no sense in risking students’ and employee safety.
