Many facets of darkness: personal accounts of the blackout
by Marisa Keller
At ten of nine Wednesday night, the clocks stopped in Runyan. Lights flickered, dimmed, or went out altogether.
Student accounts of the event varied.
Junior Laurence Harrington, who was working in the Campus Safety and Security office, reported hearing a boom from near Mills. He was fielding calls from all over campus reporting a loss of power.
“It sounded like two cars hitting each other like right outside of Runyan,” said senior Alex Painter, who was working Runyan desk at the time. “I got up to see, and by the time I got back the lights were out, the register was down.”
Freshman Owen Kerr, who was in Mills at the time of the incident, said, “I heard a little bit of a whine,” and reported that the lights dimmed, but didn’t go out. Internet was also still working, he said.
I heard a click-that’s what I heard,” said freshman Clara Lippert outside her Wilson Hall dorm room.
Residents of Warren Hall across the way reported that their dorm smelled of skunk.
“I am convinced a skunk was to blame,” said freshman Sean Conley of the electrical problems.
Senior Kevin Greve came out with a flashlight to sit on the back porch of his blacked-out College Avenue house.
“I heard that there was a piece of equipment stolen - a device that would keep us from going over the limit that would cause the circuit to blow,” he said.
(Alan Bigger, director of facilities, denied that missing equipment had caused the outage. He said that a meter had turned up missing during the February power outage in Runyan, but said that the meter had already been replaced. The two outages are not at all connected, Bigger said.)
After the full blackout occurred around 11 p.m., students gathered on the Heart, where fireworks were lit off from the ground and from the balconies of Barrett and Olvey-Andis halls. Two students ran a lap around the Heart naked, while others played instruments, sang or simply shouted and cheered in the dark.
Not far away, on the lighted side of the road, several groups of students gathered at Tim Hortons. One student, freshman Prithve Ganapathy, said he had been in Lilly Library’s 24-hour computer lab working on a presentation for the next day’s class.
“I lost my paper,” he said ruefully.
Senior Shurouq Qawariq put a more positive spin on the blackout.
“It’s nice to be free of computers,” she said.
Catie Kelly and Rosa Ostrom contributed reporting.
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