Lights out

Brian Schwartz / Special to the Roundup

 

On Sept. 29, a planned power outage occurred at Pierce College.                                                                        

The purpose of the power outage, which took place at 5 a.m., was to tie in temporary power for the contractor’s office, according to Paul Nieman, director of Facilities.

“Due to the construction project, the work trailer needed power,” said Nieman.

In order to keep everything safe, the outage was planned for early in the morning.           

The power can’t be transferred while the lines are hot, so it had to be done before it was up and running, according to Nieman.

The entire process took approximately an hour and a half.

“We started at 5 a.m. and the power was back up by 6:30 a.m. as planned,” said Nieman.

This power outage was the second one to take place at Pierce within the same month.

The outage took place early in the morning before the school was up and running.

Dominic Gasperi, the General Foreman in the Plant Facilities building, was on campus when the lights went out.

The Information Technology Manager, Mark Henderson, said that the power outage knocked all of the phone lines and Internet servers out.

“The entire campus was down. All of the network equipment, the phone lines, everything,” said Henderson.

For the Information Technology Department, the outage was not a good thing.                               

“For us, it had a negative impact,” said Henderson. “We had to recalibrate all of the networks to make sure that everything came back up properly.”

To get the phones to work again, the Plant Facilities had to notify everyone on what to do.     

“The phones had to be unplugged from the wall and plugged back in. Since there are so many phones on campus, we e-mailed everyone telling them what to do,” said Gasperi.

The recalibration process was very time consuming.

“It took us about a half a day to get everything back to normal and up and running again,” said Henderson.

Although the process of getting things back to normal may be a long one, it is not a tough one. 

“Recalibrating wasn’t a hassle, but we have 30-plus servers that we had to log back in to,” said Henderson.

Fortunately, for the professors, they did not have any class time wasted because of the lack of power.           

“It was so early in the morning that classes hadn’t started yet,” said Gasperi.

 The school came out fine after the power came back up, and no physical damages could be found.           

“There were no damages,” said Gasperi. “Only time spent.”

These power outages were not the only one to strike Pierce College in recent years. Dominic Gasperi remembers one that happened just last year.

“The power went out on campus last year after a car accident occurred where a car hit a power line,” said Gasperi. “In that situation, we had to go over and manually start the turbines and generators that we have on campus.”           

Mark Henderson also recalls a time when the power went out years ago.

“It was a couple of summers ago,” said Henderson. “Power outages were real frequent because of the heat. We had to repeat the process of recalibrating the networks multiple times, which was tough because we had older equipment.”

As of now, everything is working fine, and the school is back to normal.

           

            

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *