Out-of-state college students scrambled to avoid Helene
Eric Feldman put his faith into a $110 Red Coach bus ticket for a one-way trip to Miami after Florida State University canceled classes ahead of deadly Hurricane Helene. He headed south as the storm lumbered north more than 100 miles off the Gulf coast.
The college town in Florida’s Panhandle avoided the worst of the hurricane, which largely spared the state’s capital city by making landfall about 50 miles east in Perry. But Feldman doesn’t regret evacuating. Growing up in Peru, he experienced disasters like earthquakes. But never a hurricane.
In the week after Hurricane Helene, interviews with out-of-state college students across Florida show how little prepared they were for a storm like Hurricane Helene. For many of them, this was their first experience with a Category 4 hurricane. They juggled concern from worried parents back home, uncertainty and anxiety about whether or when to flee the hurricane’s path, challenges finding rides and relying for advice on classmates who, as Florida natives and young adults, have grown complacent about even major hurricanes.
An FSU freshman, Mia Cyanovich, 18, booked a $1,000 roundtrip ticket to fly back home to Pittsburgh. Her mother, who grew up in Tampa, warned her about the devastation across southwest and central Florida from Hurricane Charley in August 2004.
“I don’t know what it’s like to be without power and heating for weeks on end,” she said. Her mother “really wanted me to come back and evacuate. She was panicking – as every parent was – because all the models were saying the hurricane was supposed to hit directly at Tallahassee. She was like, ‘Get the heck out of there.’”
Her friends and classmates who grew up in Florida told her the storm would be nothing. They called her dramatic for being worried. Her professors downplayed FSU’s storm warnings and decision to close campus, she said. When meteorologists anticipated Helene was headed for Tallahassee, Cyanovich decided differently.
At the University of Florida, freshman Scarlett Tynes, 17, of Vancouver, stocked up on applesauce, canned beans, canned corn and canned tuna and moved her personal belongings away from her dorm room window. She didn’t see in-state students taking measures seriously.
“Personally, I’m terrified,” she said. “But then everyone here… they don’t do anything. They just kind of laugh.”
At Florida State, Rahaf Alshinhab spent about $1,000 in fall 2023 to fly home to Las Vegas during Hurricane Idalia. This year, she decided she would stay put in Florida for Hurricane Helene. Then the storm began strengthening in the Gulf, and the local Waffle House closed. She headed to Orlando, as classmates asked for rides out of town.
FSU sent out emails Tuesday morning warning students of the impending storm. That evening, the university announced classes would be canceled through the remainder of the week.
“A lot of people were posting asking for a ride,” she said. “It was already kind of too late.”
Feldman, the 19-year-old FSU sophomore, said earthquakes in South America are inconsistent and arrive suddenly. A 2007 earthquake left structural damage that persists 17 years later. Hurricane warnings are a ticking time bomb that Feldman said are incomparable to anything he’s experienced.
“I guess that my fear is the other way around – I don’t live with hurricanes,” he said. “Ever.”
Creating an evacuation plan as a college student far from family can be daunting, Feldman said. Not all students own a car – whether they are native to Florida or not. For those students without, there’s no surefire way to escape, he said.
After a 10-hour bus ride to Miami to stay with grandparents, he watched the storm veer slightly away from Tallahassee. When the weather cleared, he hitched a ride with a fellow FSU student back to campus Sunday. He watched armies of linemen travel across Florida to fix broken power lines and attend to outages.
Feldman said FSU’s decision to cancel classes on Sept. 24 did not leave students enough time to make plans before the weather started worsening the evening of Sept. 25. Helene made landfall the following night.
Earlier in the week, professors were still telling students to expect classes and exams throughout the week, he said. When FSU decided otherwise, Feldman evaluated his options and bought the bus ticket.
“I have friends who were desperately trying to get out,” Feldman said. “And they just got out last-minute – found someone who had a car, found someone who had a place nearby.”
Catherine Peer, 18, of New York, another Florida State freshman, said winds were so strong they pushed around her Mitsubishi Lancer during a four-hour trip to evacuate to stay with family in Port Orange on Florida’s eastern coast. Her dormitory neighbors coordinated shared rides to head south.
Peer said students rushed to book flights home, but plane ticket prices were skyrocketing.
In Gainesville, UF freshman Eric Goodman, 19, of Ashdown, Arkansas, was more familiar with tornadoes than a hurricane. He asked his roommate and other Florida natives for advice.
“The residents don’t seem to take it anywhere near as seriously as I probably would. This is my first ever hurricane, so it’s been a little bit intimidating,” he said.
Yunfeng Zhang, a UF freshman from Vancouver, Canada, didn’t tell his parents about the approaching hurricane. He didn’t want them to worry, he said, especially because Gainesville was not directly in the storm’s path. The hurricane caused widespread power outages and tree damage in the area..
“I think they want me to face the world,” he said. “That’s what they told me.”
He made the trek from Weaver Hall to the closest Publix to stock up on snacks and non-perishable foods, and he and his roommate decided to treat the two days off from classes as a vacation.
Tynes’ family in Canada remained in constant communication until the bad weather moved past Alachua County.
Mai Tran, a senior at the University of South Florida, has learned to adapt to Florida’s annual hurricane season after she moved to the U.S. from Vietnam for college.
“It is scary if the power and water actually go out,” Tran said.
Her dad frequently shares his concerns for her safety. He pressed Tran about whether her apartment was safe and what measures she was taking to prepare. She has not evacuated the Tampa area since she started her freshman year at USF in 2021.
“Back then, my roommates were very nonchalant,” Tran said, “‘It’s fine – this happens every year.’ And I was like, ‘OK, I trust you.’”
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This story was produced by Fresh Take Florida, a news service of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. The reporter can be reached at [email protected]. You can donate to support our students here.
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