On Friday, March 27, 2022, any student or faculty member remaining inside the main building of the MFS campus made their way down to the basement to shelter in place due to a tornado warning. The experience of being asked to move to the Stokes Hall basement was a first for many and demonstrated how quickly and seriously the school administration responded to the warning.
At around 3:30 p.m., the school rang out with sirens from student devices, alerting them the National Weather Service had issued a tornado warning for the area they were in. Five minutes later, students and faculty began heading to the basement of the main building, a hallway populated with science classrooms. According to Athletic Director Danielle Dayton, after receiving the alert, “The administrators got on the walkie-talkies and told us to bring everyone down to the main building basement.”
For the handful of people that populated the basement, sheltering in place at MFS was a universal first experience. Assistant Athletic Director Ron Obermeier, who has been a part of the MFS community for “right around 25 years,” said that “[while] we practice these [shelter in place] drills, I don’t think we’ve ever had one where we actually had to come down and shelter in place, for weather or for any other reasons.”
Andrew Zhou ’25 said that having to go to the basement specifically to shelter in place was “slightly annoying because I was just in the weight room working out, and I feel like that [space] is equally as safe as being in the main building’s basement.” Despite that, he said, “it’s not too bothersome. It’s just kind of weird. I haven’t seen this happen before.” He opined, “I feel like it has probably happened before in the past, because there’s always tornado warnings at least once a year, so it has probably happened a few times in the past, but this is my first time experiencing it.”
At 3:58 p.m., Diversity Coordinator Dot Lopez announced that those who were still in the basement and had not been picked up yet were free to go and were no longer required to stay down there. The remaining students breathed a collective sigh of relief, and faculty members began escorting them to the Dining Hall Commons. The brief experience illustrated the speed at which faculty responded to the warning to keep students safe and proved that even for longtime members of the community, there really is a first time for everything.
