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The skies were lit up with fireworks on Saturday night, but then the University of Louisville was blacked out Sunday morning.
U of L’s Belknap campus had a scheduled blackout from 7 a.m. until midnight on Sunday morning. The power outage afforded the University an opportunity to maintenance the electrical engineering of campus.
The outage seemed necessary to resolve the issues stemming from the April 9 power outage that led to the canceling of business school classes the following day and left on-campus residents in the dark for a better part of the night. This shutdown was a freak accident which occurred as a result of a blown circuit board of a generator on campus.
Sunday’s outage was planned but planned poorly at that. Outside of major football and basketball games, there is generally no reason for a mass amount of visitors to the U of L campus.
“Thunder over Louisville” is one of the few times when resident students invite friends to come spend the night with them and experience Louisville’s charm.
Thanks to unfortunate administrative planning, these visitors got a chance to wake up to a life without electricity. Visitors likely left U of L to go back to their residence halls, with such modern day amenities as light, with a bad impression of campus, which also happened to be flooded and littered with trash.
While visitors were inconvenienced, the brunt of the hassle was shouldered by on-campus residents who pay a hefty sum to live in the residence halls. Religious students had to get up, take showers and get dressed in the dark before heading out to their places of worship. Students with jobs had a similar burden. They might not have even met these commitments, seeing as their alarm clocks did not work.
Chartwells tried to make light of the matter by offering a “Candlelight Breakfast,” a $4.99 buffet supposedly lit by candles, even though candles are not allowed inside residence halls. A cute idea, but overpriced food doesn’t taste any different in the dark.
Holding a premeditated power outage on Sunday morning shows a lack of commitment to student life and tells the students that campus is presumably empty, that students who actually stay on campus have no needs prior to noon. Having it the day after Thunder over Louisville shows a lack of understanding of the student population.
If students wanted to blackout for “Thunder over Louisville,” that is their collegiate privilege, but they should not have to deal with the nuisance of a blackout on a Sunday morning.
Rather than Sundays, administration could choose to hold blackouts on Friday or Saturday nights.
Holding the blackout on one of those nights would encourage students to go out into Louisville and have fun rather than staying inside the residence hall in the dark.
By the time the students returned from activities with friends, the power would return to normal and they would not be bothered by a lack of lighting and alarm clocks.
