Iktae Park
Web News Editor
Mira Costa students and staff were faced with power outage upon their return on Nov. 29 from a week long break.
The power was spotty throughout the school day until the system was totally fixed around 10 a.m. The maintenance found out of this situation at 6:30 in the morning and contacted Southern California Edison for assistance.
“When I first saw this I thought we’d be down three to four hours at minimum, but Edison responded very quickly and I was very pleased with that,” Maintenance and Operations Manager Jeff Mullikin said.
The administrators checked in every class to check over the situation from the power outage.
“My initial concern was how it was going to affect the safety of the students and the instruction hours. We sent in administrators to each class to see the affect from the power outage,” Principal Ben Dale said.
Though many of the classes had little power available, certain classes lost all power resulting in a loss of instruction time.
“My whole class had a full black out. We couldn’t really do anything because of the power outage. So we just sat there doing nothing for an hour,” junior Zach Kay said.
The lights were spotty because of the three phases that power the campus. Each phase does not control different power sources but rather a mixture of them resulting in a power outage throughout the campus when the squirrel knocked out the first phase.
“Phases don’t control everything. It takes more than one phase to power the whole campus,” Mullikin said.
The Public Announcement system and the class bells were down for several more days.
“The PA system and the bells are tied to one central system down at the main office. I contacted a company out in the valley who deals with these issues but they couldn’t respond for a couple of days,” Mullikin said.
The maintenance believes that the cause was a squirrel they found in the power pole and assumes that the event occurred probably on Sunday.
“We received a report after that on Sunday one of the non-maintenance personnel tried to use the elevator on Sunday and noticed that it wasn’t working properly and almost got stuck in it. However, no one bothered to contact us before so we did not find out about this until Monday morning,” Mullikin said.
According to Mullikin, these animal-induced power outages are common situations and there is no real method of preventing them from happening again.
“It’s not uncommon for a squirrel or a bird to knock out power. I’ve seen it before. There is no deterrent to keep the animals out of power poles and cause power outages,” Mullikin said.
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