Ice Storm 3
Photo by Ashley Strehl

By HAYLEE BATES, Student Reporter

With the recent ice storm that has made its way through Oklahoma, Northwestern officials met in advance to prepare plans for the campus.

The emergency planning team and the vice presidents at Northwestern were the two teams that discussed the best ways to care for the students and employees on campus.

“We’ve been meeting and reviewing plans and trying to make sure that we can provide as many essential services to students as possible in case there is a wide spread power outage,” said Steven Valencia, associate vice president for university relations.

The campus took steps to get prepared for the storm, including spreading salt around and through the campus grounds.

“Certainly we want to minimize the amount of traffic on campus, and we will be working on those areas around the dorms so that students have a safe sidewalk to walk on to the cafeteria,” Valencia said.

The four dormitories on campus had sign-in sheets at their front desks, and each student that stayed in the dorms over the weekend was expected to sign in. This was one way campus officials tried to get the number of students that would be on campus during the storm.

“The most important thing, first and foremost, always is student safety,” Valencia said. “We wanted to do whatever we could to maintain the wellbeing of our students.”

The university also made the decision to cancel school Friday.

“We knew that there are some students who would feel more secure riding out an ice storm at home, rather than in a dormitory, so we wanted to give them sufficient time to be able to go home if they chose to do that,” Valencia said.

There were emergency plans that were developed to help keep the students remaining on campus safe. The emergency planning team looked at what would need to happen if there was a loss of water.

“If you lose water, we have stock piles of water that we always keep on hand,” Valencia said. “We added to those stock piles this week to make sure that we were covered as well as we could. We will make arrangements to bring in portable toilets if we have to. Certainly loss of water is probably one of our more challenging scenarios that we have to deal with.”

The emergency planning team also looked at ways to provide for students if there was a power outage on campus.

“Our generators will be focused on the cafeteria to be able to allow them to still work and to be able to serve students food,” Valencia said. “We have two dormitories, South Hall and Coronado, that are equipped with fireplaces. If there is a long term power loss, we will be able to move students into those dormitory lobbies and have a place for them to shelter.”

If there is any damage that occurs on campus from the ice storm, Northwestern will assemble a crew of people to assess the damage.

“After any type of an ice storm event, we go around and assess what damage has been done and immediately make plans to repair it,” Valencia said. “Whether it be with our own people, or whether we have to bring in outside contractors to work with it. We should be able to assess any damage fairly quickly.”

The emergency planning team tried to put together plans for the different scenarios that could occur with the storm, but they had one main concern when developing these plans: student safety.

“Whatever scenario and however many students were in the dorms, we were prepared to provide those service,” Valencia said. “Safety of our students is always our number one concern in whatever decisions we make regarding emergency planning.”