As Trojan parents make their way to campus, they may have other worries affecting their weekend plans as a Category 4 hurricane barrels toward Florida’s Gulf Coast.
“We’re happy to be here and happy that the storm is not affecting our neighborhood, but we are very concerned for our other neighbors in Florida who will probably get impacted very significantly in the panhandle,” said Alex Martins, who arrived in Los Angeles today from Winter Park, Florida.
Martins and his wife, Juliet, are parents to sophomore Sophia. Juliet said she was concerned that she and her husband would not be able to fly out of the state this morning due to the storm.
“The warnings all said this was going to be a huge storm, and my flight was leaving at 10 a.m. this morning from Orlando,” she said. “I was on one of the last flights that got out of Orlando. It started raining while we were on the runway.”
The Martins family said they were concerned about being away during the storm, but were thankful that their community is not in the direct path of the storm.
AccuWeather experts predict the storm will cause damage hundreds of miles inland with winds expected to reach between 131 to 155 miles per hour.
Julian Daller, a junior majoring in real estate development from Fort Myers, Florida, said he remembers Hurricane Ian in fall 2022 as being a “traumatizing” experience during his freshman year. The storm was a Category 4 hurricane like Helene.
“It was definitely weird being across the country and seeing all this stuff on social media and hearing everyone talk about it because it was in my hometown,” Daller said. “And kind of seeing the places I grew up in being flooded while not actually being there, it was definitely a weird feeling.”
He also said he was impacted when he returned home for the holidays and saw all of the destruction. He said the experience really impacted his ability to do school work.
Daller’s mom is already in Los Angeles for a long weekend of fun, but Daller’s dad and brother are planning to fly in on Friday. He said they had to move their flight from Southwest International Airport to Miami International Airport due to storm-related cancellations.
But it’s not just those from Florida who are feeling the impacts of the storm. Stacy Sager, who flew in from Atlanta to spend the weekend with her daughter, said her flight out of Atlanta was delayed by an hour.
“It was chaos,” she said about the conditions in the airport.
Once she was able to board her flight, she said the plane ended up sitting on the runway with zero visibility before taking off. But after some initial bumpiness, she said the flight “wasn’t bad.”
Back at her home in Atlanta, Sager said she was expecting to lose power from the storm, though she has a generator to keep the lights on. However, at her home in Panama City Beach, Florida, where City Manager Drew Whitman has issued an emergency declaration in response to the storm, it’s a different story with frequent weather updates hitting her phone.
“That’s the house I’m worried about,” she said.