U. snow closure first since 2000

Superstitious students, hoping classes would be canceled on Friday, may have performed snow dances and wore their pajamas inside-out the night before. If they did, it obviously worked. The University of Pennsylvania was closed on Friday. The decision, which is traditionally made jointly by the provost, the executive vice president and other key University officials, was primarily based on safety concerns, Provost Robert Barchi said. "I put my boots on and tromped down the streets," Barchi said. "I wanted to see if it was possible to get out there and drive. At six o'clock in the morning, it was pretty bad." By that time, five inches of snow had already fallen in Philadelphia, according to Scott Homan, a meteorologist at AccuWeather, a State College, Pa.-based private weather service. And Barchi and other University officials were concerned that there was more to come. After watching the news and discussing the situation with Vice President for Public Safety Maureen Rush, who was monitoring several news channels and talking with city officials, Barchi said that it seemed to him that canceling classes would be in the best interest of the faculty, staff and commuting students. The decision, which marked the first snow-related University closing since January 2000, was made around 6:10 a.m. so that everyone who would be traveling into the city would have heard the news by the time they had to leave in the morning. "We would be putting all these people at risk by asking them to get in their cars and drive in that weather," Barchi said, adding that his own difficult drive to Penn made him even more confident that they had made the appropriate decision. "Not only was [the storm] still in progress, but we were talking about the major impact being right in the middle of rush hour and... it had the propensity of being well up there, 10 inches or more." In fact, by storm's end, Homan said that seven inches of snow had accumulated in the city. As a result of the dangerous weather conditions, schools all over the Philadelphia area were closed for the day. And this was yet another factor administrators cited as a reason for canceling class on Friday and for allowing all nonessential staff to refrain from coming to work, Barchi and Executive Vice President Cliff Stanley explained. "We would have a lot of staff, faculty and students who commuted to school with kids at home," Barchi said, adding that the University was concerned about causing logistical problems for parents who did not have someone to supervise their children. "So we thought this represented a risk to our staff and faculty and those students commuting and the health and security of their families," Barchi said, adding that this natural concern is even more significant since the University is one of the city's largest employers. Yet, at least in terms of weather history, Thursday night's storm was not a major one, according to Homan. "I think seven inches is a pretty decent snowstorm, but I wouldn't consider it a crippling snowstorm or something major, but it was moderate," Homan said, adding that it seemed severe considering how little snow the area has gotten recently. "If you compare it to this year, it was one of the bigger storms that we've had," Homan said. "We had another one that was seven inches back on Dec. 5." "If you compare it to this year, it was top of the line for storms for this year," he added. But compared to the blizzard that paralyzed the Northeast 25 years ago, last week's storm, which coincidentally fell on the anniversary of that Northeaster, was anything but severe.