Jim O’Donnell got out of bed Friday morning, walked outside his Georgetown waterfront home and saw something he wasn’t quite expecting: warm breezes and blue skies.
“My first reaction was, I felt a little sheepish,” said O’Donnell, executive vice president and University provost. “I wondered if we made the right call.”
The evening before, O’Donnell, along with senior vice president Spiros Dimolitsas, Medical Center executive vice president Daniel Sedmak and University facilities chief Karen Frank, decided to cancel Friday’s classes outright, rather than allowing faculty and staff more time to arrive (“delayed arrival”), or letting each staff member choose whether to take the day off (“liberal leave”).
A week after its arrival, Hurricane-slash-Tropical Storm Isabel disrupted the University in some ways obvious (such as the damage to Copley Lawn caused by, in O’Donnell’s words, “some not-so-bright football players.”) and in some ways not. Behind the scenes, for example, administrators were compelled to consider closing the University long before any of Isabel’s wind, rain, or clouds were near.
Typically, when the University is forced to close (usually due to heavy snow) Frank calls O’Donnell, Sedmak and Dimolitsas shortly after 5 a.m. with the latest information about weather forecasts and conditions on campus and on local roads. The goal, O’Donnell said, is to have a consensus early enough to broadcast a decision over TV and radio stations by 6 a.m. Make the call too early, and conditions may change; make it too late, and commuters might leave their homes for travel on treacherous roads for no reason.
As Isabel loomed, administrators were forced to make their call much earlier than usual, risking a change in the forecast. On Wednesday night, the call on Thursday was relatively straightforward: though the brunt of the storm was not expected until late evening, Metro had decided on Tuesday to shut down its rail and bus systems at 11 a.m. Thursday-systems hundreds of Georgetown employees rely on daily. This fact, said several administrators, was crucial to the University’s shutdown Thursday.
“We didn’t feel confident bringing people to campus to work who would be rushing to get home by 11 or who would be stranded,” O’Donnell said.
When the time came on Thursday evening for a decision about Friday, several facts weighed on administrators. First, federal government offices would remain closed (the Law Center keeps a particularly close watch on their status); Metro had still not announced its plans for reopening; and it was, in fact, a Friday, with relatively few classes scheduled during the afternoon and evening.
Meanwhile, Isabel’s rain and wind pelted the windows of O’Donnell’s home harder and harder. “It could have gone either way,” O’Donnell said. “It was a judgment call.”
In the end, Frank, Sedmak, Dimolitsas, and O’Donnell decided to shutter the University for a second straight day. And while O’Donnell may have had sudden regrets when he walked out his door to fair weather on Friday morning, those disappeared once he walked around the neighborhood and viewed Isabel’s aftermath. Streets throughout Georgetown and the region were blocked; traffic signals were not functioning, hundreds of thousands in the Washington area had no power. O’Donnell was confident he made the right decision.
“It was probably more humane to people who had to deal with their freezers and their kids,” he said.
