Campus-wide power outages affect SG voting

POSTED FEB. 26 AT 4:30 P.M.
UPDATED FEB. 26 AT 4:50 P.M.

No air conditioning, no wireless Internet and no lights.

At about 1:09 p.m. the university lost power for more than an hour everywhere on campus, in addition to the University Village and the Gables One Tower — which houses the offices of Media Relations and Advancement and is located across the street on U.S. 1.

The outage started at Turkey Point power plant, according to CNN.com. The plant is located about 25 miles south of Miami in Florida City.

Roughly 1.7 million people initially lost power, which has since been restored to the university.

The campus will remain open for Tuesday night classes.

Although power was restored as soon as possible because the university is on the same power grid as Doctors Hospital, Student Government voting went down for more than two hours. The Elections Commission has decided to extend polling days until Thursday, said Megan Jones, head of the Elections Commission.

The voting calendar will be pushed back 24 hours, which means students will still be able to vote Wednesday night from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. in the residential colleges and from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. in the Breezeway on Wednesday and Thursday.

Some students have raised concerns about possible problems with their vote due to the outage, but Jones said that the commission doesn’t deal with things that are out of their control.

“If people were going to vote they should vote,” Jones said. “There’s nothing we can do about power outages.”

Continue to check TheMiamiHurricane.com for updates.

Karyn Meshbane may be contacted at k.meshbane@umiami.edu.