Power outage cancels classes

North Lake College’s Irving campus lost power to the C and P building on April 10. Classes in the building were to be canceled until 4:30 p.m., but power was restored by 1 p.m.

The C and P building houses the science, theater and math classrooms, which were affected by the power failure. Another office that’s located in the C building is the Health Center, which was dark and could not be reached. “This is not a problem for any of our students that are in need of our services,” said Virginia Jones, SPAR and health services director. “When an outage like this occurs,, an emergency plan of action goes into place, and if necessary we go into emergency mode,” said Jones.

“The power failure was not due to any construction problems on NLC’s campus,” said John Watson, facilities director. “It was a TXU transformer failure, not from small rodent, as was rumored earlier,” said Watson.

“At 6 a.m., a transformer failure was reported to us from NLC,” said Carol Peters, TXU’s spokesperson. TXU is the electric utility that serves NCL. “A conduit cable buried underground failed; it’s the cable that connects high voltage from NLC’s to TXU’s transformer,” said Peters.

Many NLC students were gathered in the Gallery, wondering what was going on. Some were whispering they heard that there were no classes at all, some saying only in C and P building, while still others were not sure what was going on. “It’s an inconvenience to arrive on campus, just to turn around and go home; gas is very expensive these days,” said Mallory Michalski, North Lake College student.

Students approaching the C and P building were turned away by North Lake College’s police officers. Two officers using orange cones blocked the pitch black entrance to the C and P building.

Moderator for the spring symposium Christan Amundsen, had to cancel the event because of the power failure. Students and faculty were to gather at 1:30 p.m., to discuss the education system in the Gallery. “It’s a bummer to have to cancel the symposium; without power to the microphones and the building was dark, no way could we still have it,” said Amundsen, professor of psychology. “Education is a hot topic, and we were expecting a good crowd. It’s being rescheduled for sometime this fall,” said Amundsen.

Gallery Director, Steven Benezue’s office is located in the C building, was inconvenienced, “I can’t check e-mails or return my calls,”said Benezue. However, he teaches in J-211, the ceramics lab, so his classes were not cancelled.
This is not the first time for this type of occurrence. On Feb. 16, there was a power outage in the P building and a water loss to the entire campus for 1 hour.

Even though TXU had the power restored by 1 p.m., it caused a lot of rearranging schedules for classes for both the professors and students.

“It’s not too bad; I don’t like having to go twice as fast in class to make up the time,” said student Christina Brannen.