By Sean Leonard
News Editor
The entire campus lost power at about 3:55 p.m. on Sept. 13, according to an email from Senior Director of Facilities Operations Maritza M. McGraw. McGraw said this was not a planned outage and was a result of an interruption in service from Public Service Electric & Gas Co. (PSEG).
“PSEG had a power surge which caused the substation at TCNJ to shut down. Once power resumed, the main switch at the substation failed to reset,” said Luke Sacks, head media relations officer at the College. “We then had to work with PSEG to manually reset the system and bring all of our resources back online.”
At 6:21 p.m, Associate Vice President for College Advancement and Chief Communications and Marketing Officer Dave Muha sent an email confirming that power was fully restored.
Freshman Angelo Licini is a design and creative technology major who lives in Wolfe Hall. During the afternoon of the outage, he said was walking back to his dorm from Eickhoff Hall to do some homework when he heard an electrical surge come from the direction of the power house, which is near Norsworthy Hall.
“We didn’t think much of it until we walked to the front doors of Wolfe where both sliding doors had been wrecked out of place, and a loud humming noise [came] from the elevators which were blinking yellow. At this point my friend and I took the stairs to only find out that our rooms were 1,000 degrees and had absolutely no power,” Licini said. “We roamed the halls talking to others about what had happened and wondering when the power would come back on.”
Licini said the power returned within about 40 to 45 minutes. He said this delayed him and his floormates from getting some work done, and most students used the time to write messages on sticky notes to other students through their windows.
“Some messages were funny and some may be inappropriate but honestly helped more students to bond and see more people from other floors,” Licini said.
Junior criminology major Kelly Pinzón also lives on campus and heard that her residence hall lost power through her floor’s GroupMe group chat. Pinzón is a building assistant at the Brower Student Center, so she was there when the power outage occurred.
“When we lost power, we were all a bit confused as to what was happening. When we realized the power had gone out, we switched to manually signing game room equipment out. Eventually, we started using a laptop rather than the desktops for signing out keys and equipment and looking up lost and found items for people who called,” Pinzón said.
Pinzón said the outage made usual tasks more tedious because it was being done manually, but the issues were not serious.
“We had a couple of people come up to ask about the restaurants in the Stud being open and if power was out all over campus. Other than that, not much else,” Pinzón said.
Junior applied mathematics major Anna Dorval was also on her shift as a building assistant in the Brower Student Center and said the outage lasted about 45 minutes. Although the outage was fairly brief, it complicated the Monday afternoon of many students and staff at the College.
