By Morgan Lloyd, campus editor
A blizzard hit the Northeast Jan. 4, affecting Northeastern students in Boston and elsewhere.
The storm brought not only heavy snow, but floods that set a record-high tide in Boston, according to a tweet by the National Weather Service. As a result, downtown streets were flooded with icy water.
The storm, described by an atmospheric scientist at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a “textbook example of a winter cyclone,” brought heavy winds as well — up to 50 miles per hour in Boston, according to The Washington Post.
“It was very terrible,” said first-year biomedical physics major Thu Tran. “My house didn’t have water, so I had to go to my sister’s house. But you know, the wind and the snowstorm guaranteed it was difficult to travel.”
Tran, a Boston resident, was without water in her house for two days.
Northeastern’s campus was hit hard as well. Orientation for incoming students was cancelled and administrative offices were closed Thursday and Friday as a result of the storm conditions.
For Christina Codden, a transfer graduate student studying chemical oceanography, the biggest problem was the heavy snowfall. Codden had just moved into a new residence in Somerville when the storm hit.
“I was kind of shut inside for a couple days until things mellowed out,” Codden said.
Codden, a native of Minneapolis, said she was used to big storms, but not the effects they could have on a city like Boston.
“[They’re] something that would happen every year,” Codden said. “I didn’t grow up in a big city though, so that part was different.”
First-year theatre and English double major Ciara McAloon faced similar problems with the snowfall. McAloon was visiting her home in New York during the storm.
“We couldn’t leave the house,” McAloon said. “We live on a side street, so it didn’t get plowed until pretty much after the fact.”
When it came time to travel back to Boston, however, the storm had already passed.
The snowstorm left its mark on the area, causing damage from floods and high winds and leaving large piles of snow across Boston. A large-scale cleanup operation is now underway, with MassDOT providing more than 600 vehicles for the task, according to NBC Boston.
For area natives like McAloon, however, the storm was nothing too unusual.
“We haven’t gotten a bad snowstorm in a while, but I didn’t freak out,” said McAloon. “It wasn’t shocking.”
