He came, and now he’s gone.
He left hundreds of thousands without power. He destroyed houses and uprooted trees. He left the University with millions of dollars in damages. And now, he has left many students angry about living in the dark.Hurricane Gustav ravaged Louisiana last week, leaving his mark in every city that stood in the way.”It’s the worst storm to hit Baton Rouge for the past 40 years,” said Astrid Merget, provost and executive vice chancellor.Yunchieh Chou, music doctorate student and Edward Gay Apartment resident, said her apartment lost power at 1 p.m. last Monday.”It’s been real uncomfortable trying to sleep in a humid apartment,” Chou said. “Food has been ruined, and we’ve lost a lot of stuff.”The Edward Gay Apartments had its power restored Friday evening. But unlike most of the University, hundreds of students living off campus are still without electricity.Chancellor Michael Martin said restoring power to the Edward Gay Apartments was a challenge because they needed a generator and a transformer.”With Edward Gay, we’re going to try to put one of our generators there because that is our facility,” Martin said.The addition of generators to campus apartments will help prevent students from living without power for extended periods of time, Martin said.Unlike the Edward Gay Apartments, the fraternity and sorority houses are privately owned and unable to receive a generator from the University.Greek houses on campus, where more than 800 students live, have been without power since last Monday. Houses along West Lakeshore recovered electricity Saturday evening. East and West Campus lanes and Fraternity Lane remain in the dark, as of press time.All fraternity houses north of Dalrymple, the Energy Center building, the print services building and all buildings on River Road don’t have power, the Emergency Operations Center said late Sunday night.Robin Kistler, the University’s EOC public informations officer, said Entergy and the University are working together to restore power to those houses as soon as possible.”We couldn’t put one of our own generators in the fraternity and sorority houses, but we could give them a grant to provide a generator,” Martin said.Campus damage from Hurricane Gustav could be as high as $40 million, according to the University’s EOC.Martin said a “big piece” of that is the University Student Recreational Complex.Eric Monday, interim vice chancellor for Student Life, said in a meeting Friday the UREC could cost more than $3 million to repair.The International Cultural Center was hit from Gustav’s strong winds, which blew out several stained-glass windows and damaged the roof.Martin said engineers think the ICC’s repairs could cost more than constructing a new building, meaning it may be better to knock down the old ICC and build a new one.”I don’t think we’ve reached a conclusion on that,” Martin said.Martin said a lot of people didn’t expect Gustav to affect the University and Baton Rouge like it did.”People moved up here [to evacuate] but realized they moved into the eye of the storm,” Martin said.Martin, who has been the University’s chancellor since Aug. 1, said Gustav was not his first hurricane experience, but it was the first that disabled the “core campus.””There was damage to facilities that I was responsible for [at University of Florida],” Martin said. “But I had never been at a place where we had to take on the damage of the main campus simultaneously.”Merget said she finds the University’s response admirable in meeting the important needs to the campus.”The crews are truly to be commended for the wonderful round-the-clock job they’ve done to get this campus back to functional,” Merget said.More than 1,300 people volunteered to help with the relief efforts at the University, including helping at the PMAC, the Carl Maddox Field House and the 459 Commons Dining Hall.There was one major difference between the University’s response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Gustav, Martin said.”For Katrina, we were almost exclusively an evacuation site. For this one, we were an evacuation site and a victim of the storm itself,” Martin said. “It’s been sort of a double whammy. We were taking on damage trying to protect others from damage.”He said the University is working to explore and pursue every possibility to limit the adverse effect of the storm on students, faculty and staff.Two funds are being set up in the LSU Foundation — one to assist students and one to assist their pets, Martin said.No other institution in the country could have pulled off what the University did, Martin said.”The good thing about being a new person is to see this from a perspective that some of you, who have been through this before, may not be able to see,” Martin said. “We have suffered a fairly major natural disaster. It’s remarkable that we’re able to crank it up and go ahead.”—-Contact J.J. Alcantara at [email protected]