This year’s hurricane season has brought many challenges to USF campuses, yet a specific issue has caught USF residents’ attention — package delivery delays.

Lucy Pham-Simpson, a freshman business major, said she was anxiously awaiting news about her package — it had her Halloween costume.

She “finally” got the awaited notification from USF Housing telling her she could pick up her delivery Tuesday morning.

During the back-to-back hurricanes, both on-campus mail centers had to be temporarily shuttered. The North Campus Mail Center was closed for a combined 11 days due to Helene and Milton, while the South Campus Mail Center closed for 12 days.

Because of the closures, “several thousand” packages were not being processed or picked up, Andy Johnson, director of operations and outreach at USF Housing, said.

This caused a package overload in on-campus mail centers after their reopenings, he said.

Related: USF will reopen in the wake of Hurricane Milton

USF Housing asked residents to hold off on retrieving deliveries until they received an individual notification from the department informing them their package had arrived.

After that, it was important for residents to come “as quickly as possible” to alleviate some of the backlog coming to mail centers after both hurricanes, Johnson said. 

“Their packages wouldn’t stop coming,” Johnson said.

Pham-Simpson said she got a notification early last week from USPS saying her package couldn’t come to campus because USF wasn’t taking deliveries due to the hurricane.

“My package sat at a USPS warehouse for a week because no one could come to retrieve it and USF was closed,” she said.

Johnson said whenever there is a campus closure period, USF notifies the couriers it can’t accept packages. Couriers hold mail and only start delivering once the campus reopens, he said. 

“It wouldn’t be unusual to get four to six Amazon trucks plus four to six FedEx or UPS trucks a day after a closure period,” Johnson said. 

Usually, the campus mail centers would receive 1,400 packages every two days, according to Johnson. In the two days after the centers reopened for each hurricane, the centers received over 2,500 packages.

Victoria Espinal went to the mail center first thing Tuesday morning because she “couldn’t wait” to retrieve her package – a Stanley cup.

“I didn’t know I wouldn’t be able to pick up my package for a whole week,” said Espinal, a sophomore biological health sciences major. 

Espinal said USF Housing’s mass emails made “more sense” when she learned that mail centers received an influx of packages after the campus reopened.

“I thought, ‘Damn, it’s probably chaos in there,’” she said. “I would not want to be working there right now.”

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Additional shifts were offered for student team members to work and assist with processing the additional volume coming in after the hurricanes, Johnson said.

He said one of the biggest tools in mail centers’ arsenal is being able to adjust student hours to help process packages faster. 

For larger packages, such as electric scooters, USF Housing may call residents this week and ask that they retrieve them as soon as possible to open up space, he said. 

Johnson said despite the overload, USF Housing is sensitive to the “devastation” that has occurred and will be flexible with residents’ needs.

“We will work with residents who are not able to return to campus or need additional time to pick up their packages,” Johnson said.