Blackouts rarely make for a good time. They make it impossible to charge phones, computers and iPods (every college student's nightmare), sneakily reset clocks and turn even the simplest tasks into arduous chores. These issues, however, pale in comparison to the inconvenience of last Sunday's blackout, which came complete with closed dining facilities (except for Dewick), pitch-black residence halls and malfunctioning key fobs.
Now that a week has passed and the dust has cleared, we'd like to shine some light on the administration's response. While admirable in many respects, it glazed over some very important details in favor of a large-picture view of the situation.
Case in point: the fobs. Locked-out students found creative ways to keep doors open, only to be foiled by TUPD officers who systematically re-closed them. Although propping the doors open is not technically allowed, it's not as if deeply engrained constitutional principles were at stake. Guidelines are just those, and sometimes they need to be thrown to the wayside for practicality's sake. In this case, propping doors was among the only ways to allow consistent access to dorms. We certainly appreciate the efforts of TUPD, in particular the officers who came in even though they were not on duty, but in the future we would like to see a less mechanical response.
Responding to events like blackouts is in many ways a formulaic process: Wires need to be connected, fuses examined and switched turned on and off until eventually (and seemingly magically) there is electricity. Similarly, police work is governed by books brimming with procedures; but there is also a human element, and in this case, one that is thousands of students strong. As such, there needs to be a happy medium where formulas meet with customer service and everybody is satisfied.
Part of this equation needs to be increased communication. While the most important response element is certainly to reconnect the wires and examine the fuses, the final result isn't all that matters. Students shouldn't have to just wait for the lights to go back on to know what's going on; instead, they should be kept in the loop during the entire process. And that takes more than a choppy emergency alert sent several hours after the power went out. Members of the community did not need a breaking news message to tell them what they already knew (that there was a blackout). They had other questions, and seemingly simple ones. What caused the outage? What specifically was being done to fix it?
The administration eventually turned to Send Word Now to notify students since that way it could reach even those whose computers were not working, but why not start with an e-mail for those who did have computer access? Or blast out the Send Word Now message earlier, and with more details? There is a character limit for text messages, but the administration certainly could have relied on the voice function (as it plans to in the future) or even sent out multiple texts.
Now that the dust has cleared, the picture that is emerging is one of a response that was certainly well intentioned in all regards, but restrained by a lack of creativity. Unusual situations require some flexibility, and that was really what was missing during the blackout. Now that the administration has tested out its emergency response procedures, maybe it can budget some of this flexibility into its response formulas so that next time, by the time the lights go back on, students at least won't feel as if they had been totally left in the dark.
