It’s a twister—sort of.
The DukeALERT system warned the Duke community of a tornado passing through northern Durham County at roughly 2:00 p.m. Tuesday but issued an all clear about 22 minutes later. The tornado did not actually touch down, and there were no reports of damage at Duke, Vice President for Human Resources Kyle Cavanaugh said.
“We’ve been very fortunate right now,” Cavanaugh said. “We’ve not seen the devastation that we saw in the spring.”
Cavanaugh, who is also the emergency coordinator for the University, said Duke had been closely monitoring the storm’s trajectory since 4 a.m. Tuesday. At 2:03 p.m. DukeALERT sent out an email and text message warning students to seek shelter immediately. According to the email, the National Weather Service for Durham County had issued a tornado warning after radar spotted a tornado passing over Hillsborough at 1:30 p.m. with a speed of 35 mph.
Durham had been on a tornado watch since midday.
Kammie Michael, public information officer for the Durham Police Department, wrote in an email Tuesday that the tornado caused no large-scale damage to Durham.
“We did have a report of a tree down blocking the road at West Club Boulevard and Hillandale Road and another large tree down blocking a section of Swarthmore Road,” Michael said. “We had some weather-related traffic accidents but no serious injuries.”
There is no uniform protocol dictating how professors and students in class should respond to weather-related or other DukeAlerts, Provost Peter Lange said, noting that the variety of alerts prevents uniform responses from being effective.
“There is no single policy because alerts differ and situations differ,” he said. “You are supposed to listen to the alert and respond accordingly, as we would expect any professor to do.”
Vice President for Student Affairs Larry Moneta noted that appropriate responses to the tornado depended to some extent on the type of building students were in at the time of the warning.
“What you would do for [the Fuqua School of Business]—which is contained within a building—is different than what you would do with [the Trinity College of] Arts and Sciences that spans dozens of buildings,” Moneta said. “If you are in a Gothic building, it doesn’t get much safer than that.”
Some facilities took the lead in responding to the tornado alert.
In Lilly Library, a staff member at the front desk rang the closing bell and asked those present to move to the basement, said Carol Terry, a senior library assistant at Lilly. She estimated that approximately 40 to 50 students descended into the basement.
“People were very cooperative,” Terry said. “[They asked] ‘Where do we go? Do we have class?’ And we said, ‘No, we don’t think you have class. We really want you to come downstairs.’”
Some students were unfazed by the warnings. Sophomore Coulter Knapp said he was studying a variety of dinosaur and mammal skulls in the basement of the Biological Sciences building when members of the class received the text alert.
“We just looked at our phones and said, ‘Well, already done,’” he said. “As opposed to a tornado outside—I’d rather pick looking at skulls any day.”
Senior Ari Bar-Mashiah said he was eating lunch when he received the message.
“I took that to mean to just continue eating at the Refectory because I was hungry, and that’s what I wanted to do,” he said. “I feel like I would have noticed some sort of apocalyptic event occurring outside, and in that case I would have been a little more worried.”
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