A campus-wide power outage at 1:15 p.m. on Oct. 12, affected El Camino College buildings, leaving them without electricity until 1:22 p.m.
“[The cause] was a big electric transformer on Prairie and Marine that goes out often and affects the college and people that live near the college,” El Camino Police Chief Michael Trevis said during the Campus Police Engagement Luncheon.
According to El Camino police, a member of the campus community was trapped in a Schauerman Library elevator at the time of the outage and was let out once power was restored.
Automatic doors accessing the library were stuck halfway and some areas inside the building were left in the dark without any light to illuminate the rooms.
People tried to enter the Industry Technology Education Center during the outage but couldn’t since most of the automatic doors remained closed.
Those who were working in the Humanities Building couldn’t use computers until backup power started up a couple of minutes after the initial outage.
Dispatch Officer Juan Lopez said police responded to the power outage immediately as it happened.
“We sent units to check out all the buildings around campus and we received a call from maintenance at 1:22 p.m. that power was back on,” Lopez said.
El Camino facilities assistant director Dwight Bradley gave more information on what happened during the first couple of minutes of the outage.
“The [backup] generators kicked on as they were supposed to, luckily power was restored before we had to go into any emergency action,” Bradley said.
Bradley said it was a citywide outage and El Camino wasn’t the only area affected.
According to a campus safety advisory email sent out at 3:12 p.m., SoCal Edison reported the electric power outage was experienced by El Camino and approximately 2,000 other customers within the surrounding areas.
Union editor Nasai Rivas and Union reporters Khoury Williams and Saqib Rawda contributed to this story.
