Classes will start on Monday as scheduled after Ball State and the rest of Delaware County was rocked by a severe ice storm earlier in the week.
Power was restored to campus Saturday morning after having gone several days without. Students returned to the residence halls on Sunday as scheduled. As of Saturday night, much of the area surrounding campus remained in the dark, although the situation was changing on an hourly basis.
Randy Hyman, dean of students, said the crisis management team that has been handling the situation at Ball State met Sunday for two hours and will meet again on Thursday.
Associate Vice President of Facilities Planning and Management Kevin Kenyon said that most of the damage on campus should be cleaned up by the end of the week.
According to Kenyon, roughly 100 trees will need to be taken down on campus, while many more will need to be pruned. No dollar value has been set to the damage as of yet, Kenyon said.
Despite the damage and power problems, no university activities had been canceled to the best of Hyman's knowledge.
Students living off campus are advised to contact their landlords in regards to their power situation. Those who do not have heat in their residences may arrange temporary housing by contacting the Housing Office at (765) 285-8011.
According to Hyman, since Thursday, about 30 to 40 people each night took advantage of shelter provided by Ball State at Ball Gym, which is still open to students, faculty and family in need of housing. The student center is also available for those in search of shelter.
Power
About 48,000 Indiana Michigan Power customers remained without electricity at about 9 p.m. Sunday, according to the company’s Web site, some 40,000 of them in Muncie. The utility said it expected to have power restored to 90 percent of those affected by Monday evening and to the rest by Wednesday night.
Elsewhere in the State
State officials said some of the worst flooding since 1937 had isolated pockets across southern Indiana, forcing hundreds of people from their homes.
‘‘There are problems all over the place, but they’re not concentrated in an area like a city,’’ said Alden Taylor, a spokesman for State Emergency Management Agency.
He said levees along southern Indiana’s White River, East Fork of the White River and Muscatatuck River have held so far in southern Indiana, but there were concerns that more rain forecast for this week could worsen the flooding.
In Elnora, just north of Plainville, some residents expressed thanks Sunday for a levee built in the Daviess County town after another wave of flooding in 1993.
Conservation officers with the Indiana Department of Natural Resources had rescued nearly 150 people and a dozen pets marooned by floodwaters in homes or stalled cars as of Sunday.
Taylor said officers would ticket motorists who had to be rescued after driving around signs warning them to stop. Two tickets had been issued as of Sunday, he said.
He said the White River crested at Edwardsport on Sunday at about 25.5 feet, setting a new record that exceeded the November 1993 crest by 1 foot. Crests at Hazelton and Petersburg were expected to be highest since January 1937, he said. In other areas, river levels were the highest since 1913.
Roger Axe, the director of Greene County Emergency Management, said homeowners and National Guard troops had placed about 30,000 sandbags along levees in Newberry and south of Lyons and also around homes to protect them from flooding.
He said the floodwaters and the rain-saturated ground had left the air so filled with humidity that heading outdoors has been an unusually chilling experience.
SEMA’s Taylor said no one had been died as a result of the flood or the ice storm that cut power at one point to more than 150,000 homes and businesses in north-central Indiana. He said a few people had been injured by falling tree limbs in the that area.
One Washington County man also suffered hypothermia after getting stuck in his car in floodwaters.
Cinergy spokeswoman Angeline Protogere said earlier Sunday that 70 of the utility’s customers were without power, including 47 in Kokomo. Cinergy expected to have power restored to all its customers before the end of the night.
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