Campus-wide power outage causes class cancellations

Tree trimming was a possible cause of the power outage Thursday.

Katie Nelson, Writer

Classrooms and dorm rooms across Biola’s campus went dark today after a power outage at approximately 12:30 p.m. The outage lasted until around 2:30 p.m. and forced the provost’s office to postpone classes until 3 p.m., according to a school-wide email from Campus Safety.

Immediately following the outage, students and staff were flooded with texts, emails and phone calls informing them of the situation. The first email, sent at 12:40 p.m., confirmed that the power failure affected all classrooms and that the problem had to do with Biola’s electricity supplier, Southern California Edison. The second email, officially declaring classes to be cancelled until 3 p.m., came at 12:58 p.m.

“Edison has informed us that it will take a minimum of 2.5 hrs. to restore power to campus. The Provost Office has decided to cancel all indoor classes until 3pm,” the Campus Safety email read.

Brian Phillips, senior director of operations for facilities services at Biola, said facilities services was informed that the issue was a result of trees falling on power lines.

“There’s a report of tree trimming in the area — that’s what we heard from Edison employees,” he said. “They are trying to investigate the problem.”

One area of campus that was unaffected by the outage was the Production Center, which runs on its own generator. Although the power is back on in all rooms, there are still some affected areas. These include the library, whose printers and labs need to reboot in the wake of the electric failure. 

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