Amanda Buendia ‘29
Photo by Amanda Buendia ‘29
A quiet darkness encroached on campus two days early. With a partial power outage scheduled for Oct. 13, students on the Sarah Lawrence College (SLC) campus were not expecting to lose power the Sunday before. The outage the night of Oct. 11 was not planned and, incidentally, was completely unrelated to the outage scheduled two days later.
“I couldn’t make this up… I’m sitting at home in Long Island, like, ‘what are you talking about?’” stated Assistant Vice President of Facilities and Campus Operations Maureen Gallagher.
Two days prior to the planned outage, after a day of heavy wind and rain, a large tree fell down around Boulder Trail, taking a power line down with it around 8 p.m. This caused a power outage in the Lawrence Park area, including the Old Dorms and Mead Way residence halls.
Charlie Hochwarter ‘29 explained that he had been sitting in his Brebner House dorm when he found that “everything went out all at once… just complete darkness” and silence. The stillness was quickly replaced by incessant security alarms triggered by the outage.
Then alone in his house, Hochwarter walked over to the nearby Alice Stone Ilchman Science Center to charge his phone, before heading to Hill House. On his way through the heavy rain, he recalled seeing that “all of Titsworth Dormitory was just silent and O’Silas, its neighbour, was completely pitch black.”
Housing about one third of the Sarah Lawrence student body, Hill House fortunately did not lose power at any point that week. This enabled residents to offer a place for their peers who lost power to seek refuge, so Hochwarter ended up making the “big trek” over to the Hill House apartment of his friend Elena Valente ‘29 to get out of the dark.
Hochwarter could have visited the Barbara Walters Campus Center, though, as Campus Operations directed students through email there as a place to access electricity, on account of the building’s generator.
Not all students wanted to wander out into the storm, though. As Victoria Rivera ‘27 said, leaving her Mead Way residence hall of Warren Green did not feel “worth it to go out in the rain [which was] really intense.”
For Rivera, the outage fell when she was leading a virtual meeting for the on-campus literary magazine, Love and Squalor, when they suddenly heard “a weird buzzing sound and then suddenly it was all out,” including the WiFi necessary for the Zoom meeting.
Right next door in Morris House, Ximena Arceo ‘29 was similarly inconvenienced as she was in the middle of cooking dinner, leaving her to improvise to keep the food warm. This was not what proved challenging for Arceo and her housemates, though, as she explained that “we all just kinda lost our minds without WiFi.” This cabin fever led them to play board games.
The disturbance was short-lived, as, according to Gallagher, local electrical company Con Edison responded to the outage within two and a half hours. Ironically, the buildings that lost power in the unplanned outage were almost the exact same as the buildings scheduled to lose power two days later.
The following Tuesday, when the outage was scheduled to occur, Con Edison completed the upgrade to an electrical transformer within approximately two hours, according to Gallagher. Con Edison could not verify the timing because the information was confidential to the owner of the College’s corporate account; however, Rivera provided a nearly identical timeline. Gallagher noted that the company deliberately scheduled this maintenance to occur during Study Days because there would be a decreased number of students and staff on campus.
Despite the disruption to students’ Sunday nights, Gallagher asserted that “this massive tree came down — people were lucky it didn't hit roofs.”
