Updates on Hurricane Irma have been flooding the news stations and media platforms since the first week of September. Headlines such as BBC’s “Hurricane Irma Causes Devastation in the Caribbean” and The Guardian’s “Irma’s Destruction: Island by Island” started popping up by September 7th, and concern was mounting higher and higher as the hurricane swam closer and closer to the states.
Hurricanes, or tropical cyclones, form when warm air rises up from the ocean’s surface, creating a layer of low air pressure below. Surrounding warm air pushes into that low pressure area, rises as well, and soon winds and storms are brewing (1).
Irma started as a Category 5 hurricane southeast of the Caribbean Islands, with catastrophic consequences for its people as it passed over the land, and dwindled down to a mere tropical storm (weaker than a Category 1) as it crossed the Florida-Georgia state border. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, flash floods are a continuing threat as heavy rains move across Florida, threatening the surrounding states, especially Georgia.
Thus far, millions upon millions of people along the southeast coast of the U.S. have lost power, twelve U.S. residents have been confirmed dead, and the largest recorded evacuation in history― over 500,000 people― was enacted in the Bahamas (2).
The impact of both major hurricanes, Harvey (which flooded Texas in late August) and Irma, have been felt nationwide, and even the struggles of the victims in the Caribbean islands have touched the lives of Sage Creek students.
Irma tears through neighborhoods.
Amanda Klein, a senior, has family who were living in Saint Thomas of the Virgin Islands, two very small land masses that were directly in Irma’s path when it came raging by with its strongest winds. The Caribbean islands were in much more danger of the hurricane than Florida was.
“They were struggling to get out,” Klein informed us in an interview about her Uncle Hector and his wife and two kids, “but they just got out today,” September 14. “The Royal Caribbean cruise lines are giving people in the Virgin Islands free rides and they ended up in Puerto Rico. They’re trying to get a free flight to Florida, because they don’t really have money right now.”
The devastation was rampant in the Islands, and Klein’s family wasn’t the only family without a safe home to return to. According to recovery teams, as reported by CNBC, 40,000 people were left homeless after the storm cleared (3). Now thousands are trying to find both missing family members and their footing.
Furthermore, Klein added that “Now [my uncle] doesn’t have a job, something happened with the building where he works. There were power outages, no food, no water. Now we know they’re in Puerto Rico, but we don’t know their situation.”
Most of the news circulating Hurricane Irma is about Florida, since they underwent massive evacuations this month and the streets are still flooded. Jordyn Ecoff, another senior, let us know how her family in Florida was coping with the stress and damages.
“My dad’s whole side of the family is from Florida so my sister is out there, she’s my half-sister, so her mom is out there, her grandparents, my grandparents, my uncle and aunt and cousins. And then on my mom’s side, one of her cousin’s and her kid is out there.”
“They’re all in South Florida,” Ecoff told us. “They’re all kind of near Miami. As far as I know, they were prepared. I was sent pictures of them getting water at the grocery store, I saw pictures of everyone running around, getting all their stuff together. My sister’s mom and grandparents did have to evacuate, because they live on the beach in high-rise apartments.”
In regards to how her family will move on from the trauma, Ecoff believes “they’re faring fine. My cousins lost power at their beach house, but I believe they’re staying there still. The cousin from my mom’s side lost power for a couple days. Their house is fine; a tree fell on their neighbor’s house across the street. They were pretty lucky, the storm went on pretty much the opposite side of the coast.”
When asked if she knew of any aid programs Sage students could volunteer for, Ecoff replied that “the ASL Honors Society is doing a supplies drive for Hurricane Harvey,” which swamped Texas even more so than Irma flooded Florida.
Now we may not be under much threat of hurricanes in California, but the sun-bleached beaches and plains of land pose their own versions of natural disasters. So how truly prepared are we as both Carlsbad residents and Sage Creek students?
In a very detailed and informative interview, Mrs. Jenni Watson, an Administration Assistant on the Sage Creek faculty, gave us all the details regarding safety protocol and, more immediately, the bottled water drive on campus.
“The bottled water drive is going really well, we’ve been super delighted. We reached out and asked for a target of 100 cases of twenty-four bottles. We are coming very close to that target. We are grateful for any donations and appreciate all of our Bobcats taking part in this.”
Mrs. Watson informed us that there are many reasons to collect emergency supplies to distribute throughout the school. “So you’ve got a secure campus situation, we close our campus down as a precaution, and you’re stuck in a classroom for a length of time. We then have emergency supplies in the orange buckets.” For example, schools were evacuated in 2014 when the destructive Poinsettia Fire began, and the city was on high-alert as the danger spread.
“As a district, we are trained up in how to prepare for a different range of disasters; we’re looking at earthquakes, bomb threats, shooters, wildfires. Last year, as a district-wide event, we had a tabletop exercise where we brought in principals and assistant principals from all schools within Carlsbad Unified, we had our SROs,” (School Resource Officers) “our police officers here, we had members from the fire department, all came to unite in a markup exercise of ‘this is what’s happened, how would we respond, how would we all link together between police, fire, schools, to make this effective.’” There will be another training event this year by the city of Carlsbad. “And I think, with the wildfires in previous years, it’s something that’s very realistic and good that all of our admin team are fully prepared to react to that. . .
“Our staff in each classroom will receive an emergency clipboard. It provides information: this is where you go in case of a fire evacuation, down onto the Bobcat field, so staff are fully prepared to take their advisory class down. We have on-site evacuation routes planned out; we have off-site, should there be a need that we have to get off campus and go elsewhere. . . We would be, as teachers, escorting groups to that [location] and then we would be doing attendance checks as soon as you get to that site to make sure everyone is accounted for. Our first response plan is attached to all clipboards in all classrooms, we strongly encourage all teachers to read this and look at different options.
“In case of an emergency, all of our staff is allocated to specific teams. So we have a reunification team, which would work together to identify that all students are present and then we can tick them off before they’re dismissed to families. . . We have a first-aid team, we have a food and water team, who would be responsible for providing provisions in case of an emergency.
Water and food collected for those affected by Hurricane Irma.
“One of the key things that we did this year, not only doing the emergency water drive, [is that] we filtered that in with our safety week. We have a set group of requirements, we have to do a set number of drills as a school within Carlsbad Unified District, so we wanted to get students familiar with those drills right at the start of the school year. We initiated over this week lockdown drills, secure campus, fire evacuation, and the drop-and-cover drill, so everyone got to experience all different kinds of drills, and you can be best prepared going ahead, as well as if any students have any questions, they can raise those with admin or with teachers and we can assist.”
Obviously, the school district and faculty has worked tirelessly to prepare for any type of threatening situation, all to ensure that students are entirely safe and cared for. It seems as though if Carlsbad was ever really hit with an earthquake, the place we would want to be is on this very campus.
As for aid programs or volunteer opportunities, Mrs. Watson told us about a friend of Mrs. Myer’s (the English Department Chair and teacher), a principal in Houston, Texas, whose coworker, a fellow English teacher, lost a massive collection of books in the floods of Hurricane Harvey. Through Sage Creek staff, Mrs. Myers has set up a donation campaign to restore the teacher’s collection, sending books through personal mail or direct Amazon delivery to the principal in Houston.
“It may be worthwhile just dropping [Mrs. Myers] a message and seeing if this was something she would be comfortable with opening up to students. . . It would be lovely to connect on some sort of emotional level with students who have been in Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Irma, who suffered.” Mrs. Watson suggested sending supportive videos or reaching out in any way, shape, or format to the young people who have been made victim by these natural disasters.
As the states and countries damaged by Hurricanes Harvey and Irma regain stability and begin repairs, other states and the federal government prepare financial aid endowments and recovery teams. Any help from students could mean more than you’d expect.
(1) https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/hurricanes/en/
(2) https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/breaking-down-hurricane-irma-by-the-numbers