Following a string of high wind warnings, strong winds caused brief power outages on campus the weekend of March 13. At their strongest, the winds reached almost 85 miles per hour.
Alayna Blanchard, a junior residential student, was one of the many students who experienced a power outage.
“On Friday, [the lights were] flickering a little bit, and then Saturday, nothing happened. But when I woke up Sunday morning, our power was out for an hour or so,” said Blanchard, who lives in a Capital Commons apartment.
Blanchard explained that the brief power outage wasn’t too much of an inconvenience to her day; however, it still had some effects on her usual schedule.
“I had assignments to do, and I couldn’t connect to Wi-Fi. And we have a cat. We had no communication on whether the power was going to get turned back on anytime soon. My roommate had to come pick [our cat] up and take her home,” said Blanchard.
Blanchard stated that she had never experienced a power outage on campus before March 15.
The power outages were not limited to the Capital Commons apartments. “Sunday morning, the power went out for maybe an hour or two,” said Abigail Prucha, a sophomore student who lives in a Trinity Suite.
Additionally, water utilities in the Trinity Suites were also not working for a brief period.
“There was one point where for like 10 minutes, the water went out in Trinity. I turned on my sink, and nothing was coming out … We don’t really know what happened with that,” said Prucha.
The university did not send out any communication during the power or water outages about what was going on or when the outages would be over.
“I think [my resident assistant] might have called someone [in facilities], but I don’t think there was much they could do,” said Prucha.
“I didn’t report [the outage] or anything … I feel like [the university] should do at least some form of communication. Even if they don’t know the cause, [saying] ‘we’ve reported a lot of power outages, we’re looking into it,’ that’s enough. It was literally nothing,” Blanchard said.
The outages on campus were a part of a larger wave of outages in central Ohio.
“At least 3,000 Franklin County [American Electrical Power (AEP)] customers were without power at 9:30 a.m. March 16,” The Columbus Dispatch reported. The most substantial campus outages occurred the day before those outages, on the morning of March 15.
AEP also stated that the outages were mostly caused by strong winds knocking trees over onto power lines. In addition to the trees, the wind also directly knocked over some power poles. In the event of power outages, power must be purposefully shut off so that repairs can be done.
“Put plainly, sometimes we need to shut the power off briefly to make repairs so we can keep crews safe as they restore power to more customers,” AEP Ohio told The Columbus Dispatch.
Ohio wasn’t alone in experiencing power outages, with outages occurring throughout the country due to extreme weather.
Michigan faced outages due to Winter Storm Iona, and many states experienced tornados. Tornado warnings were issued to some parts of Ohio just a couple days before the campus outages, according to TornadoPath.
“More than 450,000 homes and businesses were without power Tuesday after a one-two punch from Winter Storm Iona and severe storms and multiple tornadoes. That’s down from more than half-a-million outages throughout Monday and early Tuesday,” The National Weather Service reported.
While outages did occur on campus, university students can count themselves lucky that Ohio’s weather was comparatively less extreme than in many places last weekend.
