Campus was abuzz during welcome week as students took their parents around campus, old friends reconnected and new connections were made. In those final days before the start of the fall semester, Tropical Storm Hilary loomed large and students and faculty shared anxiety about making it to the first day of classes.
The Office of the Senior Vice President for Administration sent an email Sunday night reassuring the USC Community that campus for the most part “will continue to operate normally, and classes for the fall semester will begin on Monday, August 21 as planned.”
Khamani Griffin, a senior majoring in communication, expected classes to continue in some form,as it was predicted that Hilary would just graze Los Angeles. “It does seem that as time went on, not only did the hurricane downgrade in severity and scale, but also in size and actual tangible effect on most of the major metropolitan areas that we came in contact with, like USC, for example, deciding to hold classes seemed representative of that.”
Griffin was grateful to have professors move classes online in anticipation of the weather. “I was really appreciative of how accommodating the university professors were in offering the Zoom options in the face of a potential hurricane,” Griffin said. “It would have been really nice if the vast majority of professors followed through with this, because I do have housemates that were forced to be on campus today as a result of attending classes, and I know that was a cause for concern.”Michelle Garcia Vazquez, a senior majoring in health and human sciences, also experienced the accommodating nature of professors in her second class of the day, which “was held in-person; however, the professor did offer an option to be able to take that class through Zoom,” Vazquez said. While her third and final class “was completely canceled” in favor of the professor making “a recording [that the class] can watch asynchronously.”
According to Vazquez, the professor of health, gender and ethnicity, “said that she was concerned for everyone’s safety and that she felt it would be best to cancel the class and just have that through Zoom, so that we can watch it whenever we feel is best, given the unprecedented storm conditions.”
A professor in the psychology department, Dr. David Lavond, walked into his Seeley G. Mudd office on Monday morning to find a plastic tarp covering his desk and water damage on the ceiling. As to the extent of the water damage, Dr. Lavond “can’t fully tell” even after moving things around, having to soak up water from his chair and learning that there is a work order in place “to fix the leak and to replace the [ceiling] tile.”
Griffin’s classroom in the Seeley G. Mudd building also experienced leaks. “For oceanography, we know that there was damage done to one of the lecture halls as a result of flooding,” Griffin, the senior communications student, said. “As it currently stands, we don’t know if our next class will be held in SGM 123 on Wednesday. We’re still waiting to hear back.”
In a statement to Annenberg Media, USC Facilities Planning and Management said water damage affecting the Physical Education Building and leaks in the Doheny Memorial Library have been fixed. “The Seeley G. Mudd Building had two classrooms with water damage. Those classrooms will be back in use by Wednesday of this week. The work to replace the roof is an ongoing project.”
