The university has canceled all classes for Thursday, the third consecutive day campus has been closed due to hazardous road conditions across Abilene.
ACU Chief of Police Jimmy Ellison said closing the university always is a difficult decision, especially on consecutive days.
“The decision to close the university is never an easy one; however, safety always remains the primary concern and consideration,” Ellison said.
Ellison said the university has a weather closure team that decides when to close campus. The team consists of the ACU chief of police, senior adviser to the president, vice president for student life, the provost and the human resources director.
“People need to understand it’s a combined decision between university offices,” Ellison said. “The reason all those people are on there is because a decision to close impacts academics, employees, students and, overall, impacts the institution as a whole.”
Ellison said road conditions around campus were hazardous. He said his officers have responded to dozens of accidents on and around campus in the last couple of days.
“They are what I would classify as dangerous to travel,” Ellison said. “Travel is not advised, but from what we’re seeing, people not going any faster than 5-10 mph and being cautions are doing ok. There is a lot of slipping and sliding.”
Ellison said the weather closure team had not made a decision about classes on Thursday. However, he said the committee already is in discussion via telephone and e-mail.
Ellison said this week’s storm is a reminder that students should enroll in ACU’s alert program. He said the program is an important way of communicating campus closures and other campus issues to students. Students can enroll in the program at acu.edu/acualert.
Joel Dunn, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in San Angelo, said roads across the area will remain hazardous on Wednesday and into Thursday as temperatures will remain well below freezing.
“The roads are still pretty hazardous,” Dunn said. “Our weather observation system at Abilene Regional Airport is broken, and we can’t get up there to fix it.”
Dunn said temperatures on Friday are finally expected to climb above freezing, but Friday’s high is only forecast to reach 33 degrees. However, he said sunshine will cause some melting.
“We’re hoping it’ll be clear on the roadways. It looks like we could see some sunshine that day, and that’ll be the main force melting the snow,” Dunn said. “We’re hoping the majority will be gone. The low that night will be 26. Anything left will refreeze.”
