I am a remote phd student, who lives in Florida. On September 10th hurricane Irma hit the state of Florida. Many don’t know how this affected our lives, other than what was seen on the news. Well… here is my story, but through the perspective of an online student who is studying distance education and instructional design. Because one thing needs to be said, no amount of curriculum design can compensate for a category 4 hurricane.

Hurricane preparedness is the first issue a Floridian tackles. As you experience more hurricane’s you become more relaxed about this. But after seeing Texas hit the month before, and the fact the storm was bigger than our entire state; I was preparing and so was everyone else. And this is where the issue started. Everyone was preparing.

Storm preparations:

• Gas: lines to fill-up for gas started 8 days before the storm hit. Two to three cars could be seen waiting in line at times. But a time passed this grew to waiting behind numerous and cars in streets blocking traffic. No big deal fill up once and you are done. No! you had other supplies to get.
• Food and water: Store shelves were empty. So you returned everyday hoping to catch the delivery and even trying to time it. I have never seen no shopping carts available at grocery stores, till this hurricane. No bread or peanut butter.  I never even found water. This caused us to buy canned stuff, which we would never normally eat just incase.We bought tupperware and filled them with filtered water on the counter. By the way, this only helps if you stay in your home and don’t have to leave.
• Shelter: We checked out a nearby shelter. This was a nightmare living with 500 people in a school lunchroom. The shelters started to fill-up to capacity, 5 days before the storm. People were scared not to get a place. And they were right. You had to bring your own food. And then there were the pet issues.
• Pets: They had to be vaccinated for shelters. And to my knowledge, all shelters in Sarasota county started to accept pets. And my partner has a cat and large dog. My partner scurried around trying to get the dog and cat vaccinated last minute, because he and his godmother never kept up with vaccinations, like so many other people. Clinics were opening up specially for this issue and resulted in people waiting in long lines.
• Housing preparations: Storm shutters needed to be put up at two houses in my situation. One house was off of Phillippi Creek and is only 3 feet above sea level. We were boarding this house up… well I was. My partner and his 74 y/o godmother were running around with the pets.
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• The house is older and the yard poorly maintained. I was clearing debri just to put the shutters up for the rows and rows of sliding glass doors the house had. I can go into more detail, but this took days of back breaking work. But other people where doing the same. Things just grow like wild in Florida. I was so sore and couldn’t rest, as there was not time.
• The house is the house of the someone I am a caregiver to, and the house I chose for us to ride the storm out in. This house had galvanized shutters and hurricane brackets holding the roof. The elevation was 25 feet above the sea level, and would hopefully be fine with the estimated 10-15 feet of flood surge. This house is across the street from a canal. The neighbor, he just left and flew to Rome. No joke, Rome! This house was higher in elevation than the designated shelter three blocks away that we visited.
• Stupid Wingnuts: I had to run to hardware stores, because some or all where missing. Wingnuts are used to hold the type of shutters for both houses. Needless to say numerous stores and lines waited in. This was extremely time consuming all because my owners, didn’t keep them. I used zip ties on one of the house shutters and alternated them with the wingnuts. But so many people did make shift stuff, in hopes it would be okay.

This is where I am going to stop with the preparations. I have only scratched the surface on the tasks that needed to be done and the time consuming endeavor preparing was.  I hope that I have made my point. Ask yourself, would you want to sit down at night and do your online classwork? I ask this of one professor, who I reached out for help to, but to be found with my quiz and homework deadlines move up to before the storm instead of on the day of the storm. Just more tasks added to the list, right?

I did not even mention the emotional exhaustion dealing with people and your family. Negotiating and reasoning with the unreasonable logic people have. My partner at one point woke me at 1am to ask me if we could leave for Orlando two days before the storm, without hotel or living arrangements. Be aware the storm was the entire state of Florida. Going to the center of the state would make no difference. This was not a logical or reasonable options. Please understand the stress takes a huge toll on a person and impedes the quality or just the idea of learning. Despite having access to the internet, participation in an online course, let alone 3 full 500 level graduate courses, doesn’t seem very important or even achievable under the circumstances.

Riding out the storm:

Power went out around 5 pm from the winds. Stuck in a house, by candlelight and flashlight, completely dark from the galvanized shutters on the windows, is the basic description. Florida is hot. No internet. No electricity. Fortunately we had running water. Another reason I chose the Valencia Dr house; access to city water. The Philippi park house had septic and working toilets stop after 3-4 inches of rain. The anxiety of hearing the wind and rain kept everyone up at night. This means sleep deprivation, and increased anxiety and paranoia among four people.

The next morning we found that the storm went inland to Arcadia and lowered to Category 3. No flooding occurred, thankfully.

After the storm:

This is where it gets worse with none of the conveniences of modern life. No internet, no electricity, no air conditioning for 5 days! Mind you Florida averages 80-100 degrees during the summer and is extremely humid. you don’t feel like moving. The solar power battery banks kept phones charged and we kept them charging during the day. So the idea of trying to do the work on a mobile phone was attempted, in my car, with the air conditioning running. This was a failure.

There is also the clean up of debri and assessing loss. This high level of stress is all followed with the anxiety placed on relationships and the individual. You just can’t escape the stress, you just cope, and keep doing things. Then you deal with the aftermath when you can.

Technology during the storm:

Mobile technology did not work. Certain times of day offered no cell reception and others tediously slow reception. And I don’t mean 10-20 seconds. I mean waiting minutes for pages to load on your phone. Why? No cable wifi internet! The entire population was using their cellphone for internet. This means slow or no service. I could not connect to servers. The weird thing is social media networks allowed you to upload content and refresh. You may say I am crazy and making excuses. Well, I did some evaluations of mobile application development as part of my research over the summer for my assistantship. One topic of importance was the trouble shooting of codes and what program language helped. The efficiency of loading and downloading of content is based on the quality of the code for native phone applications. Let me just say, these multibillion dollar social media companies have well paid coders and have refined their apps for user satisfaction, and loading fast or efficiently is one of them. My native LMS application was slow and hard to navigate. But the LTI integration between the LMS and CMS caused another issue; another server to load from. So, the quick fix during during a LMS migration, didn’t work for me because of the network instability. Having content projected through two servers through an overburdened mobile network, did not allow me to access the LMS content and use it with any ease. Furthermore, the long loading times drained my mobile device quite quickly. I could not even connect to Google for information as loading a web page was worse. Not using a native application on the mobile device was far worse for the reasons I explained.

Go to an internet cafe! Not an option, as they weren’t open for 3-4 days. They didn’t have deliveries to sell goods, didn’t have electricity, and didn’t have wifi internet. Luckily we receive the electricity back before others, day 5. The Valencia house was run of a business district, which were being brought up first as part of the recovery. There were homes down the street with no electricity till the 20th. There was electricity in the lines, as we found out with the lightning sparks that woke the neighborhood up in the middle of the night with the power lines sparking down the entire street. More events to add to the stress and anxiety of the event.

Coping:

To summarize this post, I am still not over hurricane Irma. This storm is having life long alterations to my life, as any high stress situation has with anyone. What the outcome will be? I do not know, but I will cope and learn to accept the outcome. After all, learning is different from instruction, and life lessons have more influence on one’s life than formal learning.

Doing any form of school work was not really realistic, with the exhaustion, anxiety, and stress that continued. We all have our individual limits. I have highlighted all the tasks, technology issues, and glossed over the personal stress issues. But to give you an idea of the stress I am still going through:

• I am no longer with my partner and our relationship has ended due to the stress of the storm.
• I am dropping one of my courses and my assistantship is at risk.
• I am still far behind in two courses and struggling to catch up.

My life is still in chaos because of a huge storm that stole 3 weeks of my life in the form of preparations, and aftermath. I can’t imagine what other people are going through on the islands being hit. We take for granted how technology affects our lives till we lose it. And as an instructional designer in higher ed, ask yourself, do you design a course without technology anymore? And as an instructor, do you teach or facilitate without technology anymore? As administration or the institution, do you punish the learner, who is working hard to get ahead in life, by failing them because the learner has to prioritize, and adapt to things beyond anyone’s control?