A minor power outage which lasted for about 10 seconds encompassed the entire Wayne State College campus on Jan. 10 around 9:00 a.m and impacted students, staff and faculty.

Though no long term effects have been reported, students across campus believed the power outage caused many problems, including lost work and interrupted lessons, among other issues.
Austin Svehla, a junior student DJ at 91.9 KWSC, “The Cat,” felt the outage was an inconvenience.

“I was doing my radio shift,” Svehla said. “I wasn’t actually talking at the time, but music was playing. And then all of a sudden, everything, every computer, light, —everything— turned off. More than anything, it just sent me into a little bit of a panic, like, ‘did I do something wrong? Did this originate here up in the radio area on the fourth floor?’ I wasn’t able to turn one of my computers on for the rest of my shift, but otherwise, everything was smooth sailing after that.”

Matthew Williams, a freshman, believed the outage was to blame for lost class time and productivity.

“We were working in the Gardner computer lab,” Williams said. “We were all setting up our computers and the power went out, and some of us lost our work. We had to restart our computers, and by the time we got them rebooted, the power went out again, and we had to restart them again. I was thinking this was a Gardner power outage because [construction crews] were working on the CAT building or something, but it turned out to be a campus-wide power outage, so I wasn’t sure what was going on.”

While the exact cause of the outage is unknown, Facility Services Director Kyle Nelsen has ensured students and faculty that he will take action to prevent this from happening again.

“At this point, we are working with the city and some engineers to figure out what was the cause of the brief power outage on campus,” Nelsen said. “Sometimes, the equipment we have on campus can fail or malfunction. That’s what I believe might be this cause. I don’t want to commit to that, but everything is mechanical. Mechanical things do fail, so we continually work with our staff to do preventative maintenance measures on the equipment that we have, and look for things that could be causing issues like this.”

Attempts to reach other Facility Services personnel were unsuccessful.