Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Evacuation, Campus Closure, and Chaos

As I am sure many of you heard, there was a gas leak which lead to the evacuation of several homes and part of the University of Utah. Who could have known what chaos evacuating "part of the University of Utah" could cause.

It didn't help that the fire department called giving slightly different information then the emails we were receiving from the University. And eventually I read online that the University made a good decision to just close all of campus, cancel all classes and get everyone home so there were no more questions about who was doing what - of course, had I not gotten on the UofU website I wouldn't have heard about the campus closure until a half hour to an hour later. So finally, I was out of my building and heading home.

Well, don't think that getting off of campus is easy when you have 4-6 very large parking lots filtering into 2 exits which lead to a very backed up road of traffic.

I usually take the bus home but I thought I'd catch a ride with my co-worker who happens to live just down the street from us. We took about 3 minutes to walk to her car and then we waited in the parking lot in a line for 45 minutes and then once we were on the street we took another 30 minutes to get home. (For those of you who know where we live and our proximity to campus, you know that's about 20 minutes longer than it should be). Moral of the story ... the University really needs to do something about getting their information out in a timely and effective matter as well as figuring out a way to improve the flow of traffic.

I found out today that eventually some random person just decided to park their car and direct traffic and that helped out tremendously.

2 comments:

christy said...

this is so funny because on the news they were going on about how calm and orderly it all went. guess they should have asked some of the people sitting in their cars forever. glad all is well though.

Anonymous said...

Boo Hoo!