Week-long blackout at Tacoma Community College cancels Friday classes
NOTE: This story was updated at 7 p.m. Thursday.
Tacoma Community College’s campus-wide power outage entered its fifth and final day on Thursday when power was finally restored to the campus.
However, classes on the Tacoma campus have been canceled for Friday. Staff and faculty will return to the campus at 10 a.m. on Friday, the college announced late Thursday.
The sources of the power outage which began Sunday in four buildings and then spread to the entire campus on Monday were identified and temporary fixes were made, TCC spokeswoman Tamyra Howser said Thursday afternoon. They included a problem with a switch between the college’s power grid and Tacoma Public Utilities, a malfunctioning transformer and a fault in a feeder line, Howser said.
Howser said the college will announce at 4 p.m. Friday when students can return to campus.
“We are taking a staged approach with opening up the campus,” Howser said Thursday evening. “All buildings have power, and we want to give it a full night for networking/HVAC operations to return to normal. As staff and faculty return at 10 a.m., this will also be another test of stability.”
Mid-term examinations which were scheduled for this week have been moved back to next week.
“We’ve been adjusting our curriculum, midterms and papers,” Howser said.
Students have been adjusting as well.
“We are freaking out a little, but the professors are working with us,” said TCC student Von-Na Chism. “They have been awesome about communicating with us online.”
Chism, a networking and cyber security student, said her instructors have been making sure students get what they need as class schedules and deadlines are adjusted.
The power problem began Sunday afternoon on the campus at South 19th and South Mildred Streets.
Crews thought they had fixed the problem on Monday, but power went out again that evening, this time to the entire campus.
Classes have been unable to meet all week at the Tacoma campus. Classes at the Gig Harbor campus resumed Wednesday after that campus’s Tacoma-based data infrastructure came back on line.
Generators were installed to buildings on the Tacoma campus that house the IT department and science labs on Tuesday.
This story was originally published February 6, 2020 at 4:03 PM.
