A power outage in the Baseline-Merivale area on Friday Sep 23 left most buildings at Algonquin’s Woodroffe campus without electricity for almost two hours.
The outage put a halt to most activities at the college.
When the college first notified students of the outage, it also asked people to “continue normal operations if possible” and stay on campus while security investigated the cause.
Despite the outage happening in the middle of the day, many programs rely heavily on electricity to conduct their lectures and were not able to continue.
Yet, some teachers, like performing arts instructor Cath Kenney, decided to take their class outside. “We were supposed to have an exercise today involving lip sync battles but without electricity, we can’t,” she said.
An hour after the initial announcement, Algonquin informed the college community that power was not expected to come back until five, therefore, all classes for the remainder of the day were cancelled.
However, power at school came back on around 2:30 in the afternoon and the college notified students that classes starting after five were still occurring as usual.
CFRA Radio reported that a pole fire at Deer Park and Meadowlands is what caused the outage that affected the college and, according to Hydro Ottawa, around 8,000 other customers.