On Tuesday Jan. 28 at around 7 p.m., areas within the North and Central Village of campus lost power. The nine residence halls affected house an estimated 1,400 students.
According to a campus alert posted on the Geneseo website—updated on Wednesday Jan. 29 at 4:30 p.m. —a repair restored power to all affected buildings and service will continue to be evaluated by Residence Life and Facilities Services.
Among the affected buildings were residence halls Allegany, Ontario, Wyoming, Steuben, Genesee, Jones, Erie, Seneca and Putnam; Lauderdale Health Services and Letchworth Dining Hall also experienced a power outage.
During the outage, Lauderdale was affected but operated during normal hours with some limitations. Letchworth, the only affected dining hall, re-opened on Wednesday Jan. 29 at 4 p.m.
“It was frustrating because when the power went out is around [the time] when we eat dinner,” communication major sophomore Kate Rodgers said. “I basically stuffed my entire suite in a car to go eat dinner because nobody had eaten yet.”
The official Geneseo twitter posted updates for students to stay informed. On Jan. 28 at 9:33 p.m., the college tweeted “we’re still unsure when the power will be restored but will continue to post updates here.”
“We received an email from the college at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday night, much later than the outage began,” political science major sophomore Madeline Smith said. “The email failed to explain how we would be affected.”
Smith said, from her experience in Genesee, there was no hot water and the remaining cold water had turned yellow.
“There were police patrolling the halls and parking lots as all of the residents lived in complete darkness,” Smith said. “The college failed to notify us that our key cards wouldn’t work, and I was locked out until very late at night.”
According to a tweet posted by Geneseo at 11:12 p.m., crews began working to isolate the source of the power outage as “a short that has affected a circuit shared by a number of buildings.”
“We were told that we could sleep in the [Kuhl Gym] on cots, which was a fallible solution,” mathematics major sophomore Patrick O’Sullivan said. “It was definitely unfortunate that we had to go to the Union to finish assignments and charge our phones.”
At 6:55 a.m. on Wednesday Jan. 29, Geneseo tweeted that staff worked throughout the night to address the issue with vendor support services. While the power was out at this time, response crews identified and were working to solve the problem.
“I had a project due at midnight,” early childhood education major sophomore Marissa Carroll said. “My phone was on ten percent when the power went out so I wasn’t informed that I could even go to the Union to finish it. I didn’t get credit for my assignment.”
The final tweet posted by Geneseo regarding the outage announced that classes would continue as scheduled, yet faculty and staff were asked to be accommodating to students whose sleep, study time or class assignments were interrupted. “I don’t think my professors were very forgiving whatsoever that I wasn’t able to finish assignments,” economics major sophomore Anthony Albanese said. “I had a professor tell me that there were other places to study on campus with power, but I wasn’t even aware that the Union was open to students.”