Students react to Friday’s tornado warning

As sirens wailed, much of campus found itself stuck inside buildings during 45 minute warning.

Ryan Lynch, Multimedia Editor
January 16, 2016

At 2:05 p.m. Friday, the National Weather Service issued a tornado warning for Palm Beach County until 2:30 p.m.

Ten minutes later, FAU went on to issue warnings via email, Twitter, Facebook, text messages and calls to students telling them to find shelter indoors and to stay away from windows.

Snapshot of email send by school at beginning of warning.
Snapshot of email send by school at beginning of warning.

The school also sounded its warning siren and evacuated some locations on campus, including moving people from the student union into the auditorium.

According to Facebook, some parents were told by their children that teachers continued their lessons while the warning was in effect.   

Snapshot of Facebook comments from Florida Atlantic's profile.
Snapshot of Facebook comments from Florida Atlantic’s profile.

Residence halls also had a warning siren, but no one was evacuated from any of the dorms. Some students were less than happy with the tornado alerts:    @FAU needs to stop hitting me up about the tornado. I already know about it thanks I’m trying to make myself chicken nuggets rn — ❁Sahar❂ (@saharjaf) January 15, 2016

Others thanked the school for warning them:

The school issued an alert around 2:45 p.m that the tornado threat had ended and that normal activity was able to resume.

Snapshot of email sent by FAU at the end of the tornado warning.
Snapshot of email sent by FAU at the end of the tornado warning.

Ryan Lynch is the multimedia editor of the University Press. For tips regarding this or other articles, he can be contacted at [email protected] or on Twitter.