Today: Mar 28, 2024

Power outage leaves residential students in disarray

Sofia RositaniArts & Entertainment Editor

Last Sunday, the day before a big snowstorm hit, most of the campus lost power. I was one of the unfortunate ones in the shower when this happened. One second the lights are on, the next I am covered in complete darkness.

Because I was in the dorm by myself, I decided to walk to my friend’s dorm so I wasn’t alone and scared, and we sat for about six hours talking while we had no power.

The night before, we ended up losing power twice, and before that for a week straight-it happened around 3 and 4 a.m. At one point during the blackout, the emergency lights went out also leaving every floor in pitch darkness if one were to venture outside their dorm.

Because my roommate is never at the dorm I spend a lot of my time alone, and because I was in the shower with no one near me I got scared I was going to get hurt from slipping on the ground.

My friends and I, throughout the power outage, would get paranoid because people were running around and screaming in our hall and because we come from not-so-friendly neighborhoods we got scared.

We blocked our door so that nobody could get inside. When we eventually left their dorm, we booked it to the main lobby from the staircase, which was pitch black and at the lobby we found out that we had togo home.

Everything was very rushed, and we were all really confused about why we had to leave. As we were getting everything ready to go, the power finally turned back on. My dad was 15 minutes away and I had everything packed already; they said we could stay if we wanted, but they did not know if the power was from the backup generator or the normal one so I decided to go home, especially with the storm happening the next day.

If it would have happened again, I would have most likely froze because of how cold it got from the time we lost power. I have Residence Life on Instagram and as I was going home and with not even 10 minutes into the trip, I got a notification stating that we could have stayed on campus and that the power was running and staying on.

I was really upset from how everything turned out because they could have told us to go home earlier in the day if they knew the power would be out for a long period of time, or they could have told us to stay at the dorm instead of sending an email and having students evacuate right away.

And it being our last day of quarantine, of course we took the easy way out and left like they told us to the first time. It was very unprofessional and having to walk back and forth from the seventh floor to the main lobby while carrying my bags was not fun, instead I was scared, out of breath, and ready to pass out from being tired with how everything played out.

I know plenty of people who could not have gone home during this power outage, many students who were doing homework and lost all of their work.

Since this happened, my friend has bought her own emergency light because if this happens again, she does not want to be completely in the dark.

Instead, she will be prepared for another long power outage like the one we faced last week. After the power outage happened, there was another that they said would last for 10 to 15 minutes but instead lasted about 30 minutes, according to my friend who was awake during the last outage.

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