On April 8, Kirkwood Community College suffered a power outage at its main campus. The area surrounding the campus was also impacted, including the Kirkwood Apartments and the traffic lights on Kirkwood Boulevard.
The outage occurred shortly before 2 p.m. and lasted approximately 42 minutes.
According to KGAN, around 2,000 electric customers were affected by the outage.
Many students were required to leave their classes early, impacting their learning.
“We were going through the digestive system, which was one of the more complex systems. There’s a lot going on with the digestive system, a lot of enzymes,” said Moises Gomez, nursing. “So yeah, the 20 minutes, while it is just 20 minutes, I feel like it was actually really impactful.”
He continued, “At first, it was a lot of disbelief. I work at a retirement home, so we have backup generators.
“I was halfway expecting it to just be black for three seconds and then lights back on, and then it just never came on.”
The Café was also impacted, forcing it to close for the duration of the outage. Losing power also put an estimated $14,000 worth of food at risk due to a lack of refrigeration, according to staff members at The Café. However, no food fell below safe temperatures, so nothing needed to be thrown away.
Alliant Energy listed the cause of the outage as “unknown” while power was out, but in an article by KGAN they have updated the cause to “planned.”
According to Director of Student Life Seth VanderTuig, Kirkwood was not made aware of the outage ahead of time.
According to Director of Public Safety and Emergency Management David Heffer, “We are reviewing how this gap occurred and will work with Alliant, if necessary to improve communication protocols moving forward so that disruptions can be anticipated and managed more effectively.”
Regardless, students and instructors were left in the dark. Many were left wandering the halls in confusion, not knowing why the power was out.
During the outage, Public Safety increased patrols throughout campus to ensure safety for those on campus, according to Heffer. They also monitored key areas on campus.
“I’m surprised Kirkwood doesn’t have backup generators,” said Gomez. “I’d assume some sort of reserve power would’ve been set in place.”
Heffer said Kirkwood does have back up generators; however, they are only designed to support life safety systems such as emergency lighting and fire alarms, not the entire campus. He described the generators as critical for the college’s emergency preparedness.
Categories: Campus News, Local News, News
