When students received an email telling them to get off campus ahead of an incoming hurricane, it didn’t tell them exactly where to go. Some jetted back home, states away from the projected wind and rain. Others drove west to drier parts of the Southeast.
Some students, however, found that their escape routes took them even closer to the storm’s path.
Freshman Andrea Sheetz went to Greenville, South Carolina, to ride out the storm with family. When the Florence’s anticipated path began to change, she realized that she might be safer back on campus.
“It was just a matter of having to come back eventually,” Sheetz said. “So I might as well come back before anything bad happens.”
Early projections had the storm making landfall on North Carolina’s coast and moving inland towards Alamance County and the central part of the state. But on Wednesday, updated predictions showed the storm tracking further south.
“I woke up [Thursday] morning to the dotted line going right through the word Greenville on the map.”
Once she saw that the then-hurricane had changed course, she called the school and asked for some guidance. Calls to campus police and her resident assistant didn’t yield a conclusive answer, but Residence Life told Sheetz she should come back to campus.
She made the three-hour drive back north and settled in to her dorm in East Neighborhood.
“We did not expect the shift that the storm took,” Sheetz said. “I know even down there, people weren't expecting it. That's been the scariest thing, just that we don't know what to do and just how quickly it changes the entire state that it's going to rip through.”
Other students who fled to places like Asheville also came back to Elon early in the weekend, citing improved conditions at Elon after new predictions of Florence’s path.
Sheetz, who is originally from Ohio, said she didn’t know what to expect from a hurricane, having never lived through one before. She said she was surprised at how quickly her peers pulled together travel plans after the Tuesday morning email, and the attitude among the student body helped motivate her own evacuation plans.
“When everyone else was leaving,” Sheetz said, “hearing the reactions of people who said they were staying, they were scared. We were scared for them. So it just never really seemed to be an option to stay and know that you would be safe given the forecasts that we had on Tuesday and Wednesday.”
Now that she’s back on campus with much of her building empty, she says she has some shows on Netflix and HBO queued up to kill time during the rainy days.