Hi again! My second month of being an exchange student at the University of Miami is almost up, which feels strange, because I only just got back to Miami last Saturday. Full disclosure: I haven’t had class for three and a half weeks since I last posted.
Why, you may ask? In a (couple of) words: Hurricane Irma.
The category five hurricane built up pretty quickly, with initial reports only calling it a category two. Almost everyone you spoke to about it would dismiss Irma as nothing to worry about, no reason for panic at all. Maybe we’d get some rain, but hey, as someone coming from England, that shouldn’t be too painful, right?
Then the predictions started to work up some steam. By Tuesday, 5th September, class was cancelled for the rest of the week for students to begin buying supplies, preparing for the storm to come. By Wednesday, the university strongly suggested that its students evacuate Miami, Florida. By Thursday, the residential colleges (dorms) were boarded up, and the place felt like a ghost town.
Eventually the Governor of Florida issued a formal statement asking people to evacuate the state if they could. Suddenly, the little wind and rain people were expecting was going to become sustained winds of 175 mph.
Some people were still adamant to ride it out – they had family in Florida, and their home was here – what was the point in leaving? One girl I talked to even returned to the Bahamas, saying she had to go back and prepare her home for the oncoming barrage. (Her area is fine, by the way. I spoke to her a few days ago.)
My own plan was simple: Hurricane Harvey had just finished up in Houston, where my family was, so that was where I was going. I mean, running from a hurricane works like hide and seek, right? Obviously it’s best to hide somewhere it’s already been.
While some Floridians flat out refused to leave, others packed everything they could into their bags and headed for the airport, or drove up towards the Carolinas. At some point, so many people were driving away that gas stations ran out of gas. On Thursday, when I flew out from Miami, I saw families milling around with their kids, grandparents, and pets, bags in both hands, trying to get a flight. The desperation in the air was palpable, as was the stress, once the airport began to cancel flights willy-nilly. Friday was the last day you could get a flight out of Miami, and most flights were fully booked.
It was almost 2 in the morning when my 9.37pm flight actually left the tarmac.
That is not to say I had a rough time of it; once I was back in Houston, my hurricane experience essentially consisted of lazing around the house. And in fact the actual path of Hurricane Irma swung wide of Miami, so while the main campus had a lot of fallen trees and debris to clear up, and some flooded basements to clean out, most places were still standing.
The point is, we were lucky.
As you probably know from the news, about 95% of the tiny islands in the Caribbean like Barbuda and St. Martin can’t exactly say the same. More than a million people have been left without power in Puerto Rico, and the continued barrage of later hurricanes like Jose and Maria aren’t helping any matters. Places like the Dominican Republic and the US Virgin Islands are also experiencing a lot of problems. Charities like the Red Cross are asking for donations, and some sites have compiled articles detailing the different ways people can try to help much better than I ever could.
If you study abroad, it’s important to always try and find a backup plan, a place to go or people to stay with should anything come up. And it’s just as important to help others if you’re able.
Please donate if you can.