Jessica Pearlman just wanted to turn on her computer. But for a few seconds Tuesday night, she thought she had turned off the campus.
“So I had this little surprise birthday party,” Pearlman said. “I still had a lot of work to do. Hours and hours — it was ridiculous. I went to turn on my computer as people were leaving, and a loud boom came from my speakers, whereupon all the lights in my room went off. We looked in the hallway and all the lights had gone off in the hallway. We looked outside and all the lights had gone off there. And then the entire campus broke out into chaos.”
Of course, it wasn’t Pearlman’s iBook that brought down the city’s electricity, plunging Oberlin into snowy darkness for seven hours. In fact, no one is quite sure what it was.
At the time of the blackout, a blizzard had reduced visibility to near zero, and whipped up winds to a fury. According to Vice President of Finance Andrew Evans, either wind or lightning felled both of the “sub-stations” that provide the city of Oberlin with its electricity. The chances of this occurring were considered slim, and the electrical system was not designed to handle such a contingency.
As a result, the College shut down from 12:30 a.m. until 7:30 a.m. Wednesday, an occurrence unprecedented in recent Oberlin history.
ResLife immediately went into emergency mode. Resident assistants on call circled the campus making sure doors weren’t propped, candles weren’t lit and people weren’t stranded in the snow, while explaining to students what was going on, at least as far as they knew.
They eased students’ concerns about everything from terrorists, to papers due the next day, to ice cream melting in refrigerators.
While they were keeping things under control in the residence halls, things were spinning out of control everywhere else.
The storm turned First Year Eli Rosenfeld, a Student Union employee, into an unlikely hero.
“While helping my coworkers keep shit together in the ’Sco, I stepped outside to see if other buildings were out of power,” Rosenfeld recalled. “All of buildings were out of power. I noticed that about 20 yards from the Student Union was the kegerator being rolled down the sidewalk by a group of girls. I ran up ahead and stepped in front of the women and said ‘I work for the Student Union and would have done what you did had I not, but being so that I do, I’m taking this back.’”
Meanwhile upstairs on the fourth floor, Blake Wilder was loading tables onto the elevator to bring them to the attic.
“The door to the elevator was still open when the power went out,” he said. “If it had been ten seconds earlier, I would have been stuck in the elevator until seven in the morning.”
“Gales of torrential snow blocking out all vision beyond a 20 foot radius. These are the conditions in which we ventured in the nude. It was exquisite,” First-Year Harkness resident Brandon Smith said.
“The lights went out and we were all like fuck the homework and ran outside naked,” Junior David Brown said.
As all this was happening, the rooms in King were getting colder and colder. The heat in that building had gone out, rendering the rooms uninhabitable by the following morning. At 7 A.M., Nancy Dye made the call to cancel all classes before noon, and all across campus, bleary-eyed students happily crawled back under the covers.
In the infamous New York Blackout of 1977, law and order dissolved, and mayhem ruled the night. While the Oberlin Blackout of 2003 was decidedly more peaceful, the sound of shattering glass nonetheless echoed down Main Street.
Ivor Edmonds was standing at the corner of Main and College streets when a window of the Oberlin Bookstore was smashed.
Arriving on the scene he found a cracked window and the plain dealer newspaper stand lying on its side. “I’m positive that the storm ripped up the newspaper stand, and threw it in the window,” Edmonds said.
“I’ve never seen a storm like this, period,” he added.