As Florida State University graduate student Layne Griffith was riding out Hurricane Helene on campus with her cat Fig, she decided to “vlog” the experience – an ordinary decision that made her an overnight sensation.
Under the TikTok username “stormyvloggyfromfsu,” the St. Petersburg native gained hundreds of thousands of views on the social media platform for vlogging before, during and after the storm through her lens. (Vlogging is short for “video blogging.”)
With dozens of videos on Griffith’s page, her first video was posted Thursday and got over 167,000 views while her most popular video received over 718,000 views.
“I initially made the account to share what was going on with my friends because we anticipated this to be a much bigger issue for Tallahassee than what we luckily ended up getting,” Griffith, a 21-year-old aquatic environmental science major, told the Tallahassee Democrat Monday.
“But then the first video just immediately took off, so I kept doing it.”
Although Tallahassee missed Hurricane Helene’s eyewall, the Category 4 storm smacked into the Big Bend Thursday night with rain and powerful wind that left thousands without power. Some of the hardest hit counties were Taylor, Dixie, Suwannee, Madison, which were knocked completely off the grid.