Photo Credit: Gene Horecka
View of the power lines from the second floor of the E building
October 18, 2011
Meilin Liang
On Oct. 4, the school experienced it’s second major power outage this year, the first one occurring on Sept. 2. This was caused by a bird that flew into a street wire next to the E building. The teachers whose classrooms were in the two buildings were forced to go throughout the day without power. Furthermore, teachers who planned to use the projector or overhead to teach their class inevitably had to improvise and figure out an alternative way to teach or change their planned activity. Mr. Harrison, the film teacher, decided to make the best of the power outage by playing a game with his class, which correlated with film. Other teachers, such as Mr. Soltau, taught the old fashioned way with the reliable marker and whiteboard.
The school was not the only place affected; the homes and apartments in the vicinity of the school were deprived of electricity as well. Also, a section of Eggers was closed off for safety reasons. This caused annoyance for some students who leave through the Eggers side of the school and had change their route. “My ride for a tennis game was going to pick me up at Eggers but since it was closed down, I had to get picked up somewhere else,” senior Shweta Sugnani said.
The power was down for approximately six hours, returning around 4 o’clock. This outage was shorter than the last one, which lasted for roughly eleven hours. Electricians rearranged the power lines in order to prevent this event from occurring again in the near future.
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January 29, 2010
Bach Phan
Somebody or something cut the fiber optics wires to the network in November. This is what many people expected when students in the Fremont building of the school could not sign into the school network. This was especially damaging because the computer classes are held in there. Computer teacher James Briano and freshman Vanessa Fernandez found rat droppings that were scattered around the room after Fernandez and Briano went into the network room to assess the damage. They also caught a glimpse of the mouse on the computer equipment. A couple days later, sophomore Nina Becquart and her friends managed to capture the mouse inside a garbage bin and let it outside.
“I was scared… it was gross,” Fernandez said.
Math teacher Mark Clevenger, who manages the school computer network that runs throughout the school, further inspected the damage to officially determine if the fiber optics were down. His take on the situation was very different from Briano and his students. He believes that somebody broke into the computer room and sabotaged the wires because the computer room is locked at all times.
“The cut marks [were] too clean to be rats.” Clevenger said.
Four wires were cut very close to the plug and uniformly. If the wires were further along their length, they would have to have been replaced. A wire that runs from the elevator all the way down to the business office, which would have been very costly to the school. The wires, however, were reconnected with another set of plugs. After Clevenger had informed the school that the wires had been damaged, the school contacted an outside contractor to come down and fix the cut wires. To this day, nobody is one hundred percent sure if the it was a person or a mouse that cut the wire.
Computer students had to change their curriculum while the network was being fixed. Briano’s class watched a movie and looked at parts of a computer, of which they would be quizzed on. Students would have been doing Excel work if the servers had not interrupted their session.
