You're kidding, right? People's houses were destroyed. I had plenty of friends in law school who were living at home with their parents. If someone was due to start law school, and then the parents' house was destroyed, I can certainly understand deferring for a year while helping the parents move to a new house and rebuild their lives.
And the campus suffered some significant damage. I rode out the storm in Pearson. Mahoney was damaged, the Orovitz Building was damaged, there was damage to Memorial and some other buildings. There was a lot of work done to repair power lines, sewer lines, and the air conditioning circuit buried underground around the campus. And a LOT of trees had to be mulched to build Mulch Mountain near the University Center.
To their credit, UM did an amazing job of the initial recovery, in order to get classes started, but it took a long time for the housing situation to recover. Three years later, I moved into a house with one of my law school classmates. His parents had been renting the house while they waited on repairs to the house they owned. Took almost 3 years for the rebuild.