When Hurricane Isaac was thrashing Dillard University’s campus with high winds and rain late last month, knocking out power and tearing down tree limbs, missing was the panicky uncertainty that had accompanied Hurricane Katrina exactly seven years earlier.
It wasn’t just that Isaac, which lumbered ashore on August 28 in Southern Louisiana as a Category 1 hurricane, was far less powerful than Katrina. Dillard, like other universities in New Orleans, was better prepared this time.
The experience with the deadly 2005 storm and catastrophic levee failures, which flooded Dillard’s buildings with more than eight feet of water and left it shuttered for a semester, taught officials a number of lessons in disaster planning.
This time, within 24 hours of the decision to evacuate, about 150 Dillard students and staff members were safety housed at Centenary College, in Shreveport. All students, at registration, had told the university where they would be and how they could be reached if they had to flee the campus.
The colleges’ records, which had been drenched when Katrina flooded a basement storage area, have in recent years been stored in upstairs offices and backed up digitally in the cloud.
And unlike during the post-Katrina blackout period, when it seemed that no one with a 504 area code and a broken Internet connection could communicate with the outside world, social-media sites and phones registered out of state ensured that communication channels were running smoothly.
“It was like night and day, compared to the experience with Katrina,” says Walter L. Strong, the university’s executive vice president.
The slow-moving Isaac dumped about 20 inches of rain as it squatted over the New Orleans region, which was protected by reinforced levees and flood walls.
Damage on area campuses, which reopened on the day after Labor Day consisted mostly of downed trees, minor roof damage, and water leaking through windows.
Across the region, years of planning and practice with smaller hurricanes had paid off.
As the storm approached, Tulane University’s president, Scott S. Cowen, donned his rain gear and traipsed around the campus, tweeting photos and posting snippets of information about the storm.
Sleeping in Hallways
Tulane’s freshmen, who are required to live on the campus, were told to stay in their locked residence halls, and at the height of the storm, they all slept in hallways in case windows blew out. The storm knocked out power and air-conditioning for two days, but a backup generator kept the lights on in the dorms.
The university’s emergency Web site told parents not to worry if they couldn’t reach their children, whose cellphone batteries were probably fading away; a steady supply of food and water ensured that the students themselves were not.
“One of the clear lessons we learned from Katrina was that we needed to have a redundant system of communication, and we needed to put a human face to it,” Mr. Cowen says.
Loyola University New Orleans was also firing messages on all fronts. “One lesson we learned from Katrina is that you cannot communicate enough,” says the university’s president, the Rev. Kevin W. Wildes. “Students like text messages and they don’t read e-mail, and Mom and Dad look at the college Web page.”
During the most intense weather, the university’s chief technology officer monitored the temperature and condition of the room housing crucial electronic equipment.
Monty Sullivan, chancellor of Delgado Community College, says that lessons learned during Katrina kicked in there, as well, as Isaac approached. Maintenance workers hauled in trash cans, secured bike racks, and tied down anything that could crash through windows. They scooped leaves and debris out of gutters.
The presidents and chancellors of five public colleges in New Orleans met by conference call two days before Isaac struck to plan a coordinated strategy for communicating with students and resuming classes. During Katrina, students who took classes at more than one institution became confused by the conflicting announcements and schedules from each college.
Damage at Delgado was minimal. The winds ripped a vent off the roof of an automotive shop, causing minor flooding, and a 20-foot section of roof was torn from the baseball stadium.
For Northshore Technical Community College, which offers courses in fields like construction, welding, and air-conditioning repair, the storm provided an opportunity to connect students with employers needing entry-level technicians to jump into recovery efforts.
Since Hurricane Katrina, the college has expanded such courses and added new programs in fields like insurance adjusting.
Louisiana State University officials in Baton Rouge monitored the storm from an emergency-operations center set up in a secure building equipped with backup generators and staffed with teams working around the clock in eight-hour shifts. The center, set up in 2006, includes a conference room and a dozen computer stations for monitoring the campus.
But no amount of planning can keep everyone out of harm’s way. At the height of the storm, when students had been warned to “shelter in place” and remain inside, one Louisiana State freshman grabbed an inner tube, headed to a campus lake, and rode out the storm while students watched and cheered from a nearby fraternity house.
