As Hurricane Florence gathers speed in the Atlantic Ocean en route to making landfall on the East Coast later this week, officials in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia have issued evacuation orders for low lying communities near the shore. Many universities in the projected path of the category-4 storm have cancelled classes and in some cases forced students to leave campus.
“This is the biggest, most potentially dangerous storm I’ve seen here in 20 years,” Andrew Read, director of the Duke Marine Lab, tells The Scientist. “We are taking every precaution to ensure everyone’s safety.”
As of noon today (September 11), the lab, based in Beaufort, North Carolina, called off classes and sent students to Duke’s higher-elevation main campus in Durham, where classes are cancelled after 5 p.m. Wednesday. Staff in Beaufort pulled boats ashore, prepared backup generators, and returned invertebrates that had been in tanks for research to ...
