Murray State has experienced yet another power outage, and the backup systems have failed to work once again, similar to how they didn’t work last semester.
After flooding, a tornado warning, and a snowstorm, many places within Murray lost power for some time last Saturday morning. Power was restored to most of Murray throughout the day with the major exception being the entire Murray State campus. The campus remained without power until the next night. Even with power restored to most buildings, RH White and Regents Residential Colleges, the CFSB Center, and the Susan E. Bauernfeind Wellness Center all remained without power until the following Friday morning.
Due to the power outage, all the students living in RH White and Regents were evacuated and shipped to open rooms in the other residential halls. The University canceled classes for the following Monday. All of these issues stem from a single lightning bolt that struck somewhere on campus and knocked out all of Murray State’s power.
This isn’t the first time an incident like this has happened, as earlier this school year, power was knocked out and generators failed to operate.
Once again, hundreds of students were left without power, including heating and running water, only this time, it was in the middle of the winter.
This power outage had drastic effects on students. Almost every student needs electricity to be able to complete school work with most assignments now being online on Canvas. In more extreme circumstances, some students require medical devices that need power to be able to survive. Without power for even a day, many complications can arise, let alone if power is not restored for almost a week in the case of RH White and Regents.
This issue only gets worse when we now have to consider moving the residents of RH White and Regents as well. It took the University an entire day to decide what to do with the residents, leaving many residents in a cooling building with no power. When residents of RH White and Regents did receive news, many students were left confused and feared they would simply be kicked out of their dorm with no place to go.
Lack of timely and effective communication has been a cornerstone issue with Murray State for some time now and this event is no exception. It took way too long to finally decide to move students, and that decision came in a vaguely written email. Hundreds of students were put at risk due to this issue so proper communication is necessary. The worst part about this is that the University hasn’t even apologized to the students or acknowledged any negligence in this matter.
Outside of a failure to communicate and mitigate the damages of the power outage, we need to ask how these issues keep occurring. Murray State was the only place in the area where this extreme power outage occurred, and it’s not the first time. Multiple times this year already the University has called in contractors to fix power issues and ensure the backup power was able to work and every time it has been needed, it has failed or has taken entirely too long to work.
How does this keep happening every time? It cannot be cheap to call in emergency contractors each time the power goes out to fix these issues, especially for these issues to continue persisting time and time again.
Murray State needs to focus on fixing these persisting issues, instead of pushing them off more and more until it leads to catastrophic failure as we have seen this week. This power outage is only just the tip of the iceberg of problems on campus and things will only get worse if they are not properly addressed.
