Many people found themselves in the dark on campus on Oct. 22 and Oct. 25 as power outages hit campus.
The afternoon of Oct. 22 is when the first power outage occurred at 3:17 p.m., and lasted approximately half an hour. Since the outage happened in the late afternoon, there were not as many people affected due to students going home for the weekend.
However the students that were on campus Monday night had their own experiences due to the power outage.
“It is fun, and I’m waiting for the zombies to attack,” said Jennifer Normand, freshman general studies major.
Normand was exploring the darkened campus along with nursing freshman Rachel Fenasci.
“The buildings are really scary at night,” said Fenasci. “There’s no lights, except for the red exit signs. It seems like a demon building.”
Others decided to take advantage of the electricity free environment by practicing favorite hobbies.
“I think it brought people together in a weird way, because everybody is outside and wandering around,” said Jenn Res, an English major. “It’s kinda cool to see how when weird stuff happens, what happens with the people. It feels like something creepy for Halloween is going on, but it’s just a random power outage.”
Res occupied her time during the outage by playing on her acoustic guitar in the Student Union Mall.
Both faculty and students were not quite sure what to think of the power outage and what could have caused it. Campus events went on as scheduled that night. When the outage first occurred on Friday, there was concern about the Homecoming activities that were supposed to take place that day. However, none of the events were cancelled.
Outages are something that many of are familiar with. Outages usually occur only every once in a while, so when there was another power outage that occurred Monday, Oct. 25, it took many people by surprise. This second power outage lasted longer than the first one, approximately an hour and 20 minutes. This second outage occurred during the evening hours of the day, and more people were affected by this outage because the outage affected the students in the dorms and throughout the campus.
“According to the complaint report written by officers on Oct. 25, it advised all buildings were out of power,” said Chief Mike Prescott of the University Police Department.
With these two outages occurring so close together there were questions about whether there was a correlation between the two and why the outages occurred so close to one another. It is unknown if there was actually any correlation between the two power outages. There is not any indication that there will be any more power outages in the near future, but there is no way to predict them, either.