UTRGV officials explain power outage procedures
Timothy Chapman
Jan Trejo / Vaquero Radio
On Oct. 5, the power went out across the UTRGV Edinburg campus, leaving many students lost in the dark not knowing what to do.
Emergency Management Coordinator for UTRGV Pablo Mendez said there are two different power sources coming into the Edinburg campus to help reduce the possibility of a total blackout.
“Ideally, what’s supposed to happen if one side of the campus loses power it should reroute from the other half of the campus,” Mendez said. “And that was something that was done with the local provider in coordination with our facilities, trying to work that out. This time, however, the break apparently ended up happening at some point before that system would even take place.”
According to Mendez, Facilities works with the American Electric Power company when it comes to figuring out what causes power outages on campus. He explained just about anything could cause the issue.
“They’re at the forefront of that kind of incident and they’ll dispatch people to go and check out the different power lines, if you will, to see if there’s anything that’s down, any of the transformer boxes or any of the the breakers that tripped to see where that’s at,” Mendez said. “And they communicate with AEP, which they’re the only ones that can fix that kind of situation because it’s not our equipment.”
Over time, Mendez has seen all kinds of cases affect outages, including a car crashing into one of the light poles and a squirrel touching two of the power lines at the same time.
Assistant Chief of Police Van Slusser said during the event of a power outage, elevators on the UTRGV campuses are designed in a way to completely stop in order to keep the people inside safe. However, if they are not aligned with floor level, it would then take some time to get people out.
“If it looks like it’s going to be an extended outage … then there’s ways that we can access those elevators,” Slusser said. “If they’re [on] floor level, we have keys that can open the door. If they’re not quite at floor level, then if it’s going to be an extended outage, then we can have the fire department come out there and assist with getting the students out.”
He said the best thing to do during a natural disaster is for students to stay up to date on university emails for alerts.
“A big important part of that is making sure that their contact information is up to date with the university because all the students, staff, faculty are enrolled in emergency alerts, which go directly to the cell phone numbers on file and also the emails that are sent to the university email addresses,” Slusser said.
Students, faculty and staff may visit their myUTRGV portal to update their contact information.
This is Timothy Chapman for Vaquero Radio.
