On Sept. 4, Hurricane Earl’s heavy rain and strong winds forced universities along the east coast to rearrange their frosh week plans and move-in day schedules.

Beginning as a tropical storm in the Atlantic, Earl gained hurricane status on Aug. 25, meteorologists reported.  It quickly moved north and reached Nova Scotia just as students were making their way back to school.

“The winds really picked up and there was torrential downpour,” said Megan Jennings, orientation co-ordinator at the University of Prince Edward Island.

“It didn’t hit as hard as I think was expected, but it was raining quite a bit,” said Justin Caines, welcome week co-ordinator at St. Thomas University in Fredericton. While the east coast is no stranger to hurricanes, Earl still managed to bring about several changes to orientation week plans at STU, Nova Scotia’s Acadia University, and UPEI.

“The last thing we want . . . is for students to come in and we have no power just because of the hurricane,” said Adam Campbell, vice-president (campus life) at Acadia.

STU turned its move-in day into a “two-day affair,” according to Caines. The goal was to ensure the majority of the students had safely arrived at school so everyone could participate in the Welcome Week events, he said.

For  UPEI and Acadia, this meant postponing move-in day until Sept. 5, which in turn shifted the order of Welcome Week activities. While AU kept its student union building open, all Canadian students were “highly encouraged” not to arrive until Sept. 5, said Campbell. International students had already moved into their residences before the storm hit.

In many cases, all orientation events scheduled for Sept. 4 were deferred to the next day, while Sept. 5’s events were distributed throughout the week.

“It was a little bit of a tight squeeze but . . . it all worked out in the end,” Campbell said.

Hurricane Earl forced UPEI to cancel their first day of orientation altogether, resulting in several extra hours of re-booking entertainers and contacting all the hired help.

Nevertheless, Jennings called the storm a “blessing in disguise.”

“A lot of the events ended up working out anyway and it just gave me an extra day of planning,” she said.

With the worst of the storm behind them, Canada’s eastern provinces resumed their normal routines. The universities were able to look back and appreciate how they handled the situation.

“I think we were smart,” Caines said of STU’s adaptations. “Once Monday hit,” he said, “[STU was] running on schedule as we had planned all summer.”

Jennings said UPEI viewed their brush with Hurricane Earl as a learning experience. “You can never count on the weather, right?” Jennings said.

She said she wants to schedule future frosh events more evenly throughout the course of a week, just in case a hurricane decides to hit again.