On Monday, two campus power outages resulted in unsaved Word documents, faulty alarm clocks and half-cooked s’mores. According to Michael Williams, Director of Facilities, Mass Electric, PA’s electricity supplier, was forced to cut power to campus at 11:45 a.m. because of a problem with one of their transformers at a substation. OPP restored the power a few minutes later by switching the power source from Mass Electric to the school’s private generator. Although Mass Electric restored power to campus at 1:35 p.m., OPP did not switch back from its generator until 3:15 p.m., which caused a second brief power loss. A few buildings, including George Washington Hall, are not connected to the school’s generator. As a result, they remained powerless from 11:45 a.m. to 1:35 p.m. Other buildings, including Gelb Science Center and Harrison Hockey Rink, never lost power at all because they run on separate, high-voltage distribution lines. The return to Mass Electric’s power was initially planned to be around 5:00 p.m. but was shifted earlier after minor problems with PA’s personal generator occurred. However, because the time was moved up by two hours, an OPP email warning about the afternoon outage failed to reach most students on time. Zach Boyd ’10 was sitting in his room when the power went off in the afternoon. “I was pretty mad at first, because I thought they might be shutting it off for the Green Cup Challenge, but they got power back pretty quickly,” Boyd said. “I didn’t get the email about the power outage until after it happened.” Curie Kim ’09 was caught off-guard by both the morning and afternoon power outages. When the power was cut for the second time, Kim was getting ready to make s’mores in the microwave and was worried the microwave was malfunctioning. Like Boyd, she received OPP’s email only after the power had returned. Although most day students were unaffected, Stephanie Schuyler ’08 lost power at her home in North Reading from noon until around 4:45 p.m. “I was late for classes Tuesday morning because I didn’t set my alarm clock right after the power came back,” said Schuyler. “I accidentally set the time for PM instead of AM.” Stores downtown did not escape the power outage either. Wutae Lee ’10 went to town after the 11:45 a.m. power loss and said that many of the stores were temporarily closed due to the lack of power. According to Lee, the blackout downtown lasted around 45 minutes. Lee also said that the brief blackout exacerbated heating problems in his dorm, Bartlet Hall. “We had been having problems for a while now, but after the power went out, the heating problems got even worse. We finally got it fixed [Tuesday].” Like other students, Lee also forgot to reset his alarm correctly for Tuesday morning and woke up at 7:45 a.m. According to Will Brooke ’10, two students in his first period math class were late for an exam that morning, and one of them had to make it up on another date entirely.
