Uni High Students reactions and thoughts on the Tornado

On February 27, two tornados hit the Champaign-Urbana area, and Uni High students’ classes were interrupted to conduct the necessary precautions. The first tornado was considered to be a moderate tornado, but there were still large chunks of hail, heavy rain throughout the majority of the day, and wind speed which reached 80 miles per hour. Students in the Uni High building had to come to the second floor and sit in the tornado position for about thirty minutes.

The students in Kenney Gym had to go to the gymnastic boys locker room where they also sat for thirty minutes before they went back to their normal schedule. After the first tornado, there was about an hour gap before Champaign-Urbana had received another alarm for a tornado which was in the area of our Uni High building.

Even though this tornado was less dangerous, Dr. Radnitzer says, “when everybody’s phones were going off and everybody was getting signals, it wouldn’t hurt to go to DCL’s basement” So all the students who were in the Uni High building would have to cross the street, and head to DCL’s basement.

Mahdi Dastgheib, a freshman, said, “at first, I thought it was just a drill, but when I found out, for some reason I wasn’t scared”. Jessy Nzinga, also a freshman, has similar feelings. He said, “I thought it was pretty cool to get time off of class, but I wasn’t worried about the tornado”. When asked about how other Uni students handled the situation, James Yan, a subfreshman said,“Uni students handled the situation pretty well, like nobody was stressed, and everybody was joking around”. However, when asked about DCL’s basement Mohammed Iftikar said, “It was a solid six out of ten…DCL’s basement did not have enough space for three hundred people, and there was no air conditioning. I didn’t like it at all”.