October 17, 2024
While Winthrop recovers from Hurricane Helene, students question the university’s response to the emergency. Facilities Management Associate Vice President James Grigg offers his perspective.
On Sept. 26, Helene made landfall as a Category 4 storm, sweeping through the Panhandle and striking as far north as Tennessee. In South Carolina, 72 mph winds and heavy flooding tore through unprepared communities. In total, 36 people had died, and 1.3 million customers were without power. Images of the damage to Winthrop’s campus and Rock Hill circulated online in the aftermath: downed power lines, flooded roads, fallen trees, and debris. Worse still, the storm left many Winthrop students completely in the dark.
James Grigg, the Associate Vice President of Facilities Management, talked with The Johnsonian about the stresses that Helene put on the campus. “I’ve got no power on campus. I’ve got [a] limited amount of generation power…We’re not going to be able to keep the student body on campus much longer.” Duke Energy, which provides power for most Winthrop facilities, had been crippled by Helene. Although the university remained in contact with Duke throughout the storm, the extent of the damage strained Duke Energy’s resources. “At that point, Duke Energy was thinking it could be as far as Monday before power could be restored to campus,” Grigg said.
Helene’s unexpected severity left many students feeling uncertain about their immediate future. Caitlyn Mayes, a sophomore who lives in Phelps Hall, spoke about her experience. “I found out we had to evacuate at the very last minute. I found out at 3:30 or 4 [on Friday] that we had to evacuate. And I’m not from the Rock Hill area.” Although Mayes had learned of the evacuation on Friday, campus leadership had been made aware of Helene five days before the storm made landfall.
At the time, Helene’s path and strength were still in flux, but campus leadership had already begun their preparations. Grigg described the effort as “getting a leg up” by taking proactive steps that would not disrupt campus activity. These preparations included stocking generators with fuel, cleaning gutters, and draining Winthrop Lake.
On the morning of Sept. 26, the Winthrop University Emergency Management Team announced that Friday classes would be remote. The damage proved to be worse than anticipated: the next morning, university leadership closed the campus and canceled Friday classes entirely. Six hours later, university leadership extended that closure through Sunday. Helene had taken down a large power transmission line, a problem that would take time for Duke Energy to fix.
Mayes, who struggled in the immediate aftermath of Helene, said “I don’t have a car. I had to find a way to get back home.” But Mayes’s mother, who she hoped would pick her up, could not find the gas to drive to Winthrop.
For Mayes, what followed was a scramble to find a hotel for her and her roommate. They booked a room at the Fairfield Inn, but upon their arrival, “the hotel was already sold out,” Mayes said. Mayes and her roommate contacted 20 other hotels before finding a vacancy in uptown Charlotte.
“I don’t think the University did enough,” Mayes said. “On Wednesday, they should have told us to evacuate instead of waiting until the last minute. Some people live out-of-state or live far away. I feel like we should have evacuated Wednesday, and then we wouldn’t have had to worry about it.”
After losing power to several dorms, the university scrambled to find its own solution to the housing crisis. Residence Life conducted a poll on Friday of how many students would not be able to evacuate. “So, we kind of had a rough number,” Grigg said about the poll, “and we thought we weren’t going to be able to fit them into every nook we had on campus.”
Their solution was to convert Winthrop Coliseum into a temporary shelter, complete with dining facilities, shuttles for transportation, and mattresses in the Coca-Cola study area. But when the message went out, only six students responded to the offer.
“Now, I feel like we pay enough as students to where we shouldn’t have to stay at the Coliseum,” Mayes said about the university’s temporary housing plan. “They should have given us a hotel or something instead.”
When only six students responded to the offer to stay at the Coliseum, Residence Life worked to find them space in Courtyard and Campus Walk. Because Courtyard is attached to the Rock Hill grid, it retained power when the rest of the campus failed.
By Sunday morning, power had been restored to campus. A damaged transformer delayed Thompson’s restoration of power, and a temporary transformer is currently supplying power until a permanent solution can be found.
“There’s always lessons learned,” Grigg said about the university’s response. When asked about the university’s plan to protect the campus from future storms, Grigg spoke about the design for a planned cafeteria. “One of the things we want to do as part of that new design is not have that on Duke Energy’s power grid but have it on Rock Hill’s power grid. We’ll have redundancies. If we lose power on the Duke side, we’ll have power on the Rock Hill side.”
But for Mayes, the trouble runs deeper than the electrical grid. “The next time we have a hurricane or a situation, they should inform the students a couple of days before, so everybody has time to evacuate.”
Although Helene has passed, students continue to reflect on the university’s response. Many hope that the lessons learned from the storm will better prepare everyone for the next crisis. Whatever comes, it is important for students to remember the financial and well-being services that are offered by the university, and to make use of them when in need.
