Hurricane Helene reached the Midwest on Sept. 26 after it made landfall on the Florida-Georgia coast, causing a power outage on DePauw’s campus the next day.
While DePauw Theatre was in the middle of one of its “Into The Woods” performances on Sept. 27, a part of campus had fallen under complete and utter darkness.
Emily Loera ‘26, was one of the attendees and did not realize that there was an ongoing power outage. She was notified by her roommate via text.
“Walking back, it looked like ‘The Purge.’ It was super dark and super sketchy. It looked so weird down the street of Rector Village with the lamps not working,” she said.
Loera made it back to Senior Hall, but only to realize that the ID scanners were not working. Neil Brown ‘25 is a Resident Assistant (RA) for Senior Hall who had to stand outside the door, letting residents in as per DePauw Housing and Residence Life (HRL) protocols.
“The only way to get in the building was to be let in from the inside,” Brown said. “No real difficulties, my only worry was that my phone would die and I wouldn’t be able to communicate with the housing office or my residents.”
HRL stated that in previous incidents of power outages, their on-call team implemented the same protocols, which include having the RAs help with letting residents into buildings.
Rebecca Jackson ‘26 is Loera’s roommate who notified her of the power outage. “I was about to watch a show on my iPad and then, boom, the lights go off.”
This was not the first time Jackson experienced a power outage, so she made quick work of clearing out the dairy in her fridge and checking to see if the water was still running.
At 9:40 p.m., HRL sent an email out to students stating that Facilities Management was on site working to restore power to affected areas across Bloomington Street Hall and Senior Hall. Various Greek houses had lost power as well, but these are not under HRL and Facilities Management jurisdiction as these are not university-owned housing.
Aside from food spoiling and a smelly hall from the lack of air ventilation, students said the loss of power did not seem to greatly impact them.
“There is someone that smokes in our dorm and of course because there is no power the AC doesn’t work, so the whole floor started smelling like weed. It was super annoying. It stank. Someone had to prop the door open because the smell got so bad,” Loera said.
For Jackson, she said, “The power outage brought me closer to my roommates. We were thinking, if this was the 1900s or 1800s, you wouldn’t have even noticed the power going out. That was really fascinating. If it would have gone longer, then it would have been difficult to do my homework and impacted me more.”
Angel Manrique ‘26 had just arrived at his fraternity house, Delta Upsilon (DU) when the power had gone out. He said it looked like a haunted house.
“I was annoyed by the situation because after I went to go study, I was playing basketball. And obviously when you finish doing sports stuff you want to take a shower, so I had to wait,” Manrique said.
To pass the time, he and a group of roughly 15 of his fraternity brothers decided to play hide-and-seek.
“We played for 45 minutes to an hour. I hid and went all the way upstairs where we do homework and hid behind the couch. The place I’d go every other round because no one would find me was under the counter in the kitchen.”
After exhausting the game and taking a walk around campus, a smaller group of DU members played another game, Hot Seat.
“We took (this time) to interact with each other to its full capacity,” Manrique said. “A lot of us didn’t go to sleep until 1 a.m. or 2 a.m, some even until the lights came back on.”
Housing stated that the power was restored around 3 a.m. on Sept. 28.
When Jackson was asked if there was anything DePauw could have done better in this situation she said, “They could have provided us with supplies. I had water and food, but some other people might not have had supplies. So they could have provided compensation.”
Loera joked with her friends that the event was not on her “2024 bingo list,” following the 2023 cybersecurity incident that impacted DePauw’s connectivity and online services.
While the power outage might not have been in Indiana’s bingo list, it was for Florida. In the midst of its yearly hurricane season, Tampa resident and DePauw student, Haleigh Menendez ‘25 shared that her family currently resides in a Georgia evacuation zone.
“This was hard for them, especially because it was hard to find a relatively affordable place to stay on such short notice,” Menendez said. “But I also had family who couldn’t afford to evacuate and had to stick it out.”
Currently, Menendez is studying abroad in London for an internship and a semester-long service program. While away from campus and her family, she has been “feeling very anxious and stressed for the safety of my family and not knowing how this storm is going to affect them and not being able to help them. It has been a very hard month and will probably continue to be difficult for a couple months.”
She continues to pray that her home doesn’t face extensive damage. Menendez finds positivity through the community’s support across Tampa Bay.
She pleaded for people at DePauw to check-in with loved ones who live in Florida and “to have grace and compassion for the people who are going through this right now.”
“It’s not as simple as just leaving, and many people are and will be suffering from the aftermath of this hurricane and tornadoes for probably the rest of this year,” Menendez said. “Hurricanes are bound to happen, we just gotta be prepared and band together in order to survive and keep living!”