By VICTORIA ADDISON
Executive Editor
Hundreds of students living along Madison Avenue were caught in the middle of a power outage last week that resulted in the loss of electricity in their dorm rooms for 36 hours.
On Wednesday afternoon, a total of 475 students were notified that they had to leave their residence halls until power was restored. Of the halls affected, Centennial was the largest.
Students were advised to stay elsewhere with family or friends, whether it was on or off campus. For those without either option, a hundred cots were delivered to the gymnasium from the American Red Cross for students to sleep on. Communications professor Mary Alice Molgard, who works closely with the Red Cross, helped to ensure that students would be accommodated by facilitating the delivery of the cots.
A resident of the house at 912 Madison Avenue, Miranda Combs, decided to stay with her friend in Collins Hall on Wednesday night rather than in the gym.
“It’s just hard because when you go back to your room it’s so hot,” she said. “I couldn’t really sleep last night and now I have to bring all my stuff to her house so I can stay there.”
Combs said that staying in the gym seemed “a little awkward.”
Apart from the residence halls, the Lally School of Education, Heuther School of Business, and Science Center all lost power due to their location on Madison Avenue. By the end of the day on Wednesday, a series of three emails had been sent to students announcing the cancellation of morning, afternoon and evening classes in each affected building. The College also had to cancel classes before 4 p.m. the next day.
In the midst of the outage, Saint Rose security worked hard to ensure that students were safe until power was restored. Guards helped to escort students across the street since certain stop lights on Madison were not working.
“The safety of students is the first priority,” said security guard Tim Williams, who was stationed at one of the more popular crosswalks around campus.
Another guard was in charge of checking the affected buildings to ensure no fires broke out, since the buildings’ fire alarm systems were not working due to the outage.
According to National Grid, the first power outage occurred on Wednesday around 10 p.m. and affected about 2,400 customers in downtown Albany.
After power was restored, another outage occurred at 2 a.m. that left 300 customers without power. The remaining customers included those who resided in parts of the Saint Rose campus that sits along Madison Avenue.
The outage was caused by an underground power issue, which can take longer to repair than an overhead cable line. One of National Grid’s media relations specialists attributed the outage to a defective wire.
“So what happens is, just like anything else, something starts to heat up when you get a lot of power being used through air conditioning and things like that. It just wears out decides it isn’t going to work anymore,” said Nate Stone.
National Grid worked to restore power by sorting through 900 yards of cable in each direction to find the faulty cable and then replaced it with a new line. They initially suspected a problem with the line due to a blown manhole cover.
“We discovered the original one because there was a manhole that had kind of blown off and was knocked over a couple feet,” said Stone. “The manhole covers are how we access our lines down there.”
According to Stone, some of the underground lines date back to the 1940s. As cables get older, they start to go bad and eventually just give out.
Crews were able to find and fix the damaged cable by 2 p.m. on Thursday. The College notified students immediately that power had been restored and it was safe to return to the affected residence halls.
