At approximately 4 p.m. on Friday, power was lost to buildings across campus. In an email sent at 6:56 p.m., Albion College announced that power was restored to “all residential areas of campus.”
According to a campus safety officer, minutes after the outage, they were “getting calls from everywhere,” and didn’t know what was going on.
The officer added that students would “probably find out what’s going on before us.”
Cleveland junior Brixton Bright, who was walking to Baldwin when the outage began, said he saw a transformer on the corner of Park and East Cass St. “pop” on one of the “new lines that they just put up.”
“It was more like a camera flash, but it was red-orange, then there was smoke coming up,” Bright said.
Lynn Smith, a resident of Park St., said that when the power went out, the power pole in front of her home was humming, and “boom, flames shot straight up.”
Before power had been restored, Smith, who lost power earlier in the week after Sunday’s storm, said the Consumers Energy website was estimating that power would be restored by 10:45 p.m. that night.
“It’d be nice if it was just that and it didn’t do any damage and they can replace that,” Smith said. “But with our luck that part will have to be special ordered from Italy.”
Killian Altayeb, Bella Bakeman, Noah Guevara, Lizzy Kelley and Jocelyn Kincaid-Beal also contributed reporting to this story.
Leave a Reply