Power Out in Several Quads, Cause Unknown
By Rachel Young At around 9 p.m. Sunday night, power went out in the West and Schomburg apartments, Kelly, Tabler, and Roth quads with sources indicating that flooding from heavy rain might be responsible. An RHD said the cause of the outage was not yet known and indicated that it may be a while before service is restored. "The power isn't going to be on anytime soon," she said, declining to be named. No other residence halls or academic buildings were reported to be affected by the outage, including at Pritchard Gym, where the Gym Class Heroes concert was held. |
To campus's credit, emergency lights stayed on in every quad, even when the room lights didn't, and H, Mendy and Roosevelt kept full power all night. I've already heard rumblings that they're going to take the opportunity that the construction affords to start putting in more and more emergency generators and isolating parts of the grid so when one quad goes out the rest don't follow.
Well, if emergency lights didn't even stay on, then the campus would probably be facing lawsuits. It's pretty typical of them: they'll do just enough to cover their butts, but not enough to actually solve the underlying problem(s). How many blackouts does it have to take for the campus to get new emergency generators and isolate parts of the grid? Last year, the Independent covered two blackouts in a week which hit H Quad and Mendy, so those quads have not been spared in the past.
I'd like to know what they have in the administration building or the SAC, because the lights never go out there. They do seem to go out often in the buildings where students actually live, though.
What's really ridiculous is that, at least in tabler anyway, we're still running off genarators. Well, were actually because as I'm sitting in my dorm room right now we have no power at the moment.
Same old story
Yes, I realize the weather was very severe. However, you would think that with all the power outages that parts of the campus have experienced, even during times when the weather was not severe, that Campus Res and the University would invest in some generators or backup power for the dorm buildings. After all, students are paying quite a bit of money to live in the dorms, definitely more than the going rate for rooms to rent at most locations off campus.
After all, this is not even close to the first time the lights have gone out. What has the University's response been? Maybe they should use some of the money they want to spend on a rec center on some generators first.