Athenian Continues to Deal with Effects of January Power Loss

As hungry high schoolers strolled into the Main Hall for lunch on January 17, 2024, many of them noticed a change: the absence of power and light. This unanticipated event forced many Athenian community members to quickly come together to find a solution.

“It was Monday morning, around 10:00 am, when we had lost power a few times earlier in that morning, and Ken, our maintenance technician, had been able to flip the breaker so that the power would come back on. But it wasn’t staying on,” Bridget Guerra, Director of Operations, said.

It is important to note that the Monday that Bridget was referring to was January 15, 2024, or Martin Luther King Jr. Day, when students were not on campus.

Cassie Kise, Director of the Carter Innovation Studio, also shared her first encounter with the power outage. “I actually noticed something happened the day before the power officially went out. I heard a beeping going on upstairs [in the CIS]. We work in a building with a bunch of machines and equipment, and I always assume strange noises are coming from random projects or things like that. But I heard it and thought, ‘That doesn’t sound right.’ So I went upstairs and found that it was the emergency circuits box,” Cassie said.

In addition to Cassie’s unusual encounter in the CIS, Bridget shared how the power outage itself was unusual. “We’ve been having issues with power ever since the building was built, but not to this extent. This time, we can’t get power to the breaker connected to the Main Hall and CIS,” Bridget said.

Previously, maintenance in Athenian was able to flip a switch in the breaker box to get the power back on. This time, however, they were unable to do so.

Cassie suggested that the power outage was a state-wide issue, not just an Athenian-wide issue. “There’s a trend right now in Northern California where [circuit breaker] panels are going out because there is a lack of qualified electricians to work on buildings due to the cost of living and labor shortages. As a result, there are a lot of cases right now where people are hooking up panels that are not getting installed properly because people aren't trained to the level they need to be trained to. Currently, we don’t exactly know what caused the outage because the larger the electrical system, the harder it is to track what happened,” Cassie said.

As of the end of February, the power outage situation in the Main Hall and CIS has still not been fully resolved. Thus, the staff had to come up with a temporary solution.

“What we have done is we rented a generator, and that generator is being connected to the building to give power. However, it means that we have to be very conservative about the energy that we’re using, so we’ve asked everyone in the building to not use anything that is not essential since the generator requires diesel fuel. We use up the fuel depending on how much energy we need in the building. Right now, we’ve been refueling almost every day,” Bridget said.

Executive Chef Miguel Aguilar also shared his first recollections of the power outage. “On the day of the power outage, I was already here at 5:00 am, so I already started the beef stew. As a result, when the power went out, most of the lunch was already ready to go. So we got really lucky that everything was done. The only thing we had to worry about was the salad bar,” Miguel said.

The power outage also allowed Miguel to get creative, such as planning the rest of the week’s menu and meals for boarders. “For the first day, we didn’t face too many challenges besides not having the power to see. That’s why we opened the windows and the back doors to get a little bit of light. One of the main challenges was cooking dinner for the boarders on Wednesday night. We didn’t want to open and close the refrigerator and let any cold air out. Luckily, the boarders were open to ordering food that night. On the same day, we had to talk about the next day's lunch. We decided to order cold sandwiches because that's the only thing we could do,” Miguel said.

Finally, Miguel shared what processes the team must undertake in events like these. “We try to be organized and explain to each employee what they have to do. We make sure that everyone washes their hands and doesn't use knives in the dark because we don’t want people to injure themselves,” Miguel said.

Athenian has already begun to consult secondary power options because of this recurring issue. “Currently, we are researching and speaking to energy consultants about backup power solutions. Because we’re a boarding school, it’s really important for us to make sure that at least the Main Hall, which has our food, stays powered up. And so, backup power solutions would include a combination of solar, battery backup, and generator,” Bridget said.

“In cases like these, you just have to adapt and do it,” Miguel said.