Snowpocalypse

Posted March 10, 2021 by William Crouch

The semester has been off to a pretty crazy start for me. I’ve been in Texas for nearly a year now because of the pandemic while Simmons has put its classes online. As most of the world saw, Texas went through a snowstorm the likes of which it had never seen before in February. I thought I might share my experience with how the storm affected my ability to do my classwork and how the Simmons professors were extremely understanding and adaptable to my situation. To start off, the snowstorm began to hit my part of Texas in the late afternoon of February 14th. Luckily, that was the same day that the final project for LIS 439 was due for my class and I was able to finish it before things got crazy. The next day, electricity and internet began to be erratic which made it difficult for me to access Moodle and my other two classes’ readings for that week. Most of Texas did not expect the storm to get as bad as it did and many of us were not prepared for no heat or electricity over the next couple of days. Texas is known for its heat which is what we usually construct our houses to protect against but almost nobody built their house with extreme cold in mind. After spending last winter in Boston, I was not as shaken by the cold but by the end of the day on Tuesday, the constant cold and inability to escape it in my own house wore me down a little. By Tuesday evening, I came to the conclusion that there was very little possibility of having power and internet restored in time for my classes so I had to email my professors to explain that I was not going to be able to do the work on time for that week. Both were extremely understanding and basically said that we could just chalk up the missed work as an “Act of God”. Wednesday evening, my town put us all under a boil water notice and I jokingly stated that it was almost like we were in the Dark Ages again. We have a plague, we have no power or heat, and our water is unsanitary. By the end of Thursday, things began to look up with power seeming stable and Friday morning the rolling blackouts were finally called off. Saturday morning, our boil water notice was also called off and things were seemingly back to normal. Obviously, other parts of the world have cold as bad or even worse as what Texas had to deal with, but our homes’ lack of preparedness for the cold, loss of power, and loss of potable water just really began to take a toll on all of us. My professors’ sympathy and understanding with my lack of electricity was extremely helpful in giving me one less thing to worry about during a difficult time. I cannot express enough gratitude because if I was having to worry about school work in addition to what Texas was already dealing with, it would have been extremely stressful.