Duke Energy crews worked Thursday to restore power to Columbus East High School. An partial outage caused classes to switch to e-learning Thursday, but students were set to return to school today.
Mike Wolanin | The Republic
Columbus East students have returned to classes following a day of eLearning that took place due to a power outage at the school.
As of about 1 p.m. Thursday, Bartholomew Consolidated School Corp. Director of Operations Brett Boezeman said that power had been restored, and systems were being turned on in phases to ensure that there were no further problems. An hour later, BCSC announced that after-school events would resume Thursday afternoon, with students returning to in-person classes today.
The school corporation had previously announced on Wednesday night that “critical portions” of the high school were without power. BCSC officials said that while they were working with Duke Energy to fix the problem as soon as possible, East students might have to move to eLearning on Thursday. At about 4:30 a.m. Thursday, BCSC confirmed that the building was closed to students, and an eLearning day would occur.
Teachers worked on site for at least some of the day Thursday, as certain areas of the building still had power and internet connectivity, said Boezeman.
“It’s rare for us to just have eLearning at one building,” he said. “It’s usually snow-related and affects the entire district, or whatever. So this is a little bit new for us to work through, but all things considered, it seems to be going pretty well.”
In discussing the potential cause of the outage, Boezeman said that some BCSC buildings on the east side of town experienced a brief outage around 3:30 p.m. Wednesday, with power going out and then quickly coming back on. School officials believe this may be when the more serious outage began at East, as there may have been a surge of power when things came back online.
The longer-lasting outage is believed to have been limited to just the high school. It primarily affected the north end of the building, including the auditorium, most of the C4 wing, dental and science labs, and the cafeteria.
Boezeman noted that some residents might have been confused by the high school’s appearance, as the most of the lights at East were on all night Wednesday and some of Thursday. He explained that while the power outage was concentrated on the building’s north side, the issue also affected certain systems on the building’s south side, including the controls that dictate when lights turn on and off.
“There’s a transformer near the tennis courts that feeds both ends of the building, essentially, and the problem we’re having is the one that feeds the north end of the building,” said Boezeman at about 9 a.m. Thursday. “So that runs underground, obviously, to the north and then enters the building at the northwest corner of the building. And the challenge is that that feeds, that runs a lot of our critical systems. So HVAC, our water heaters, our building control systems — which run lights and HVAC and boilers and chillers and pumps and all that sort of thing — all of that’s without power.”
Fire alarms were also affected by the outage.
Duke Energy was on site at the school and worked throughout Wednesday night on replacing the line that feeds the building from the transformer to the north end. Workers tried to trench the line in but were not able to do so, due to a gas line. School officials were notified at about 10 p.m. Wednesday that they would instead have to bore the line in, which takes more time. Gehring Underground, Inc. was involved with the boring and was “working around the clock,” said Boezeman.
