Screams of “NO!” echoed through the hallways of Bear River when the lights turned back on this Friday.
On January 12, a power outage occurred at 10:51 a.m. that affected 1355 people, including Bear River High School. According to PG&E, the outage lasted for almost an hour with the power being restored at the campus at 11:46 a.m. At press time, PG&E had yet to specify the reason for the outage.
Most students were elated at the prospect of being able to go home early on a Friday.
“If we do go home, I’ll have more time to hangout with my friends after school,” said Senior Savannah Thrasher. “I’m extremely happy.”
Freshman Jacob Knox speculated about what was occurring while the power was out.
“I think it made every student not want to work at all,” he said. “I hear they might let us go at 12:30 if the power doesn’t go back on, because a lot of the essential things at school aren’t working anymore. We need wifi for Schoology and we need wifi for computer classes.”
Sophomore Sebastian Carranza’s reaction to the outage was likely the same as most other students.
“My first reaction was, as any student would say, ‘Yes, I don’t have to do school anymore!’ but then I immediately realized that there is no way that the power isn’t going to turn back on soon,” Carranza said.
Vice Principal Cathy Peterson was happy with PG&E’s quick response to get the power back on.
“PG&E said that 1,300 customers were involved,” she said. “They estimated the power wouldn’t be on til two o’clock, so they did pretty well.”
Despite school grinding to a stop, Ms. Peterson thought the whole thing was blown out of proportion compared to other situations.
“Just think about the people down east that are digging out of seven or eight feet of snow, and we are uncomfortable for 45 minutes and having a fit,” Ms. Peterson said. “This doesn’t shake my world a whole lot.”
While Ms. Peterson wasn’t affected by the outage, Social Studies Teacher Jeffery Carrow had the opposite reaction.
“My first reaction to the power outage was like, ‘Oh man, we have no power and we have really invested our entire curriculum into the Chromers,’” Mr. Carrow said. “What am I going to do?”
Even though he had a negative first reaction, Mr. Carrow was able to look at it in a positive light.
“I feel like this a good lesson in going old school and that we can still easily get through our lives with just face-to-face reaction and the good old sun,” said Mr. Carrow.
— Savannah Earl, Massiel Chavez, Hannah James, Jaden Watson, and Hope Chylewski contributed to this report.
