Editor’s Note: The student interviews were done as part of a multimedia project produced by Alberto Alonso Pujazon Bogani.
A winter storm began in Portland and stretched the MLK weekend break from a three-day break into a week-long campus closure. Portland State campus closed early on Friday, Jan. 12, before the predicted storm. Due to ice and lingering freezing temperatures, it did not reopen until Saturday, Jan. 19.
“My experience with the snowstorm was pretty bad,” said student Chavez Perez. “I didn’t have power for four days, and I got behind on all my assignments. I’m just playing catch-up now.”
The storm left Portland with hundreds of downed trees and extensive power and internet loss. Nine people lost their lives due to weather-related incidents.
Among the visible markers of the incident were the psychological effects of the event. “It started affecting my mental health,” said Omar Sanchez, another PSU student. “I was going crazy. I wish I had a nice warm jacket; that’s all I could think about this entire time. I was freezing. I was shivering. Thankfully, I’m still here.”
PSU’s Incident Management Team (IMT) in charge of deciding whether or not campus should close. When temperatures were supposed to reach around 40°F on Wednesday, Jan. 17, the IMT sent out a late-opening notification the night before when the freezing rain and ice storm began.
Nonetheless, students woke up Wednesday morning with a PSU alert in their inboxes postmarked for 6 a.m. relaying that the campus would remain closed, as the road conditions saw little improvement overnight. Temperatures hung around 28°F that day, hitting a high of 33°F, according to the National Weather Service.
“The snowstorm was pretty bad here on campus,” said Ariana Acevedo, a student at PSU. “The entire Park Blocks were totally covered in ice, so nobody could even walk to school, so I knew classes were going to get canceled. The library was even closed, so I couldn’t go do my homework there.”
Pipes burst in the Smith Memorial Student Union building on Jan. 17, necessitating a water shut-off throughout the building. The campus operations team repaired the broken pipe and turned the water back on, cleaning up the resultant mess in time for the campus to reopen on Monday, Jan. 22.
PSU’s protocol in the case of inclement weather is to notify the campus community by 6:30 a.m. for daily closure, or as soon as practical, if the campus must close early.
Tiara Johnson—director of emergency management and one of the IMT overseers—said the team met daily to analyze safety concerns. Some notifications were sent out in advance of the protocol deadline when conditions made it clear that the campus would be unable to open.
“The reason we normally wait [until] the morning [is because], if you spend enough time in Portland, weather forecasts are really variable,” Johnson said.
Students and the rest of PSU’s community are alerted to campus closures by signing up for PSU Alerts—the campus emergency notifications system. Students receive an email to their @pdx.edu email account. Otherwise, the campus does not have a way to enroll students in the program automatically. Johnson said that students can also go into their MyPSU account and staff into their Banweb account to sign up for the alerts and update their notification preferences.
“I acknowledge that we’re making decisions for a very diverse community that lives all across the Portland metro and people have a variety of different circumstances,” Johnson said. “It’s hard to always know how we can best support every single person and so we do our best to ensure safety on campus.”
Essential services—such as housing facilities, Campus Public Safety and the University Place Hotel—remained open throughout the winter weather.
PSU’s IMT created a landing page for campus closures the week prior to the storm in preparation. This page contains all the necessary information for students, faculty and staff on what to do in case of a campus closure. The team attached the link to all PSU Alerts emails to make the information available.
“I really encourage folks to consider now [what] personal safety measures they can take,” Johnson said. “And that’s not just for winter weather, that’s for extreme heat, flooding and wildfire smoke. Again, we all have all our own circumstances, and we encourage students to have proactive conversations with instructors and/or supervisors as needed.”