At nearly 9 p.m. Tuesday, March 9, the power went out on campus and within surrounding areas in Grand Junction. Officials with Xcel have reported that 9,610 people were without power for nearly two and a half hours.

Michelle Aguayo, who works with media relations at Xcel, stated that there were actually two separate power outages that occurred. The first outage affected Grand Junction and New Castle and lasted for only an hour and 12 minutes. The second outage affected only Grand Junction residents and lasted for two hours and 23 minutes.

There were two causes for these outages said Aguayo. “The first cause is still being investigated,” she said. “The second cause was basically that a breaker failed to open.” Aguayo said that an outage is really the system’s way of preventing something worse from happening, like a substation fire. According to Aguayo and Xcel no large damages have been found.

The power outage did affect the nearly 1,300 residents living on campus. Zack Peterson, a sophomore living on the second floor of Monument hall said, “It (the outage) stopped me from writing a paper.” The outage that killed lights in all of the rooms and buildings on campus, also affected the IT department. The campus wireless internet was down for nearly two hours. Peterson, who is in a wheelchair, uses the elevator to get up to his room. “I studied in the hallway, but I heard the elevators were still working during the power outage,” he said.

Kent Marsh, who is the Director of Facility Services or as he puts it, “basically the campus landlord,” said that after the outage the first response was to make sure no one, was trapped. “There were a couple of students trapped in an elevator on campus,” Marsh said. “We dealt with that first.”

According to Marsh the school’s main electric meter, located on Orchard, was not receiving any energy from Xcel. “We did have a temporary generator outside the west edge of the College Center that kept the emergency lights on,” he said. Other emergency lights were kept on through the help of uninterrupted power supplies and backup generators.

Students living in the residence halls were worried at first, but the resident assistants were on sight helping keep people calm. “We weren’t panicking,” Jeremiah Bossow said. Bossow is a senior in the lineman program and lives in Rait hall. “We were trying to figure out what happened,” Bossow said. “We heard it was a substation outage.”

During a power outage it is important to be prepared. Aguayo suggests that one of the first things to do is to call your power company. “Many times we already know, it’s just good to hear it from customers, because it helps us pinpoint the areas without power,” Aguayo said.

Many students and community members flocked to the places in the area that weren’t affected by the outages. Ronee Freier, a waitress working at Old Chicago, said that the restaurant was getting ready to close when the lights went off all over town.  Old Chicago was one of the local businesses that was not affected by the power outages. While the rest of the city went dark, the lights stayed on inside Old Chicago.  “We got five tables within five minutes,” Freier said. “Then we got about another 20 within the next hour.”

On campus, students were able to find yet another excuse for not turning in an assignment. When the breaker did not open, it was lights out for Mesa State.

cmartine@mesastate.edu