Even though the mountain of snow on top of their cars seemed never ending, they sighed, picked up their shovels and dreaded what was to come next.
Sophomores Carli Markus and Danny Walsh were not the only ones who were stuck digging their cars out from storm Nemo’s record amount of snow dropped in the New England area last Friday.
While some students planned on using Sunday as a homework day, the blizzard had something else in store for them.
Students were informed through an instant alert system put out by Fairfield on Sunday that, in order for the parking lots to get plowed properly, students needed to shovel out their cars so they could be moved to another lot.
“We tried to make cleaning up fun and all of our friends came and helped us shovel the car out,” Markus said.
Many students had similar stories about their friends helping anywhere they could when it came to removing cars from the powdery, heavy snow. View pictures of the cleanup here.
“We came up with a plan and went car to car with all of our friends and shoveled one another out,” said Danielle Hill ’15.
“It was a lot faster that way and then we could hang out and enjoy the rest of our night and snow day,” she added.
As soon as Sam Maxfield ’14 woke up Sunday morning, he noticed a car stuck in front of his townhouse.
With the help of Public Safety and about 10 other people, Maxfield and friends were able to remove the car from the snow in about two hours.
“It didn’t surprise me at all to see a car stuck when the townhouse roads were barely plowed and had about a foot of snow on all of them,” said Maxfield.
Only three shovels were shared between everyone at the townhouses, which made digging out cars a much longer and difficult process.
Senior Jordan Freeman was lucky enough to not have his car at school during the storm, but ended up spending four hours outside helping friends shovel their cars out of the snowy mess.
“I feel that the University’s snow preparedness was mediocre; however, the students came together to help each other dig out,” Freeman said.
“There was no systematic plan for what got plowed,” he added.
Freeman reported that the village was like a zoo and there were no clear paths made for walking or driving until late on Sunday.
Unfortunately for seniors living at the beach, conditions were not much better than on campus.
Senior Eddie Lynch was outside for hours on Sunday trying to dig his and his housemates’ cars out of the snow.
Lynch, not only got a bad sunburn in the middle of winter, but after successfully digging his car out of the snow, he found that one of his tires was flat.
“We were stranded for two days at our beach house. Digging out the snow was such a long and slow process,” said Lynch.
Other students took a more relaxed approach to the storm and got to fully enjoy all of the snow that Nemo brought.
Freshman Rachel Steriti and her friends spent the day building snowmen, having snowball fights, going sledding and even skiing and snowboarding down the library hill.
Steriti added, “It was great to see everyone at Fairfield bonding over the snowstorm and hanging out.”
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