Humber North residence power outage upsets students

Feb 16, 2018 | News

The seventh floor of T building without power. (Aleema Ali)

By Aleema Ali

Most residence students at Humber’s North campus have been without power, hot water, and food in their refrigerators since approximately 11:45 a.m. Thursday.


Students were sent a mass email from Humber Residence indicating power should be back on by Friday tonight in buildings R and T. Power was restored to building S around 6:30 p.m. last night according to students.

Cameron Gonsalves, a first year film and television student, said he was in the shower when the power went out in S building. Although it was only out for a short amount of time, Cameron still suffered.

“I had to dump my whole fridge out. I missed a deadline for an assignment because my laptop died. I was on a phone call last night and couldn’t finish it because my phone died,” Gonsalves said.

Andrew Leopold, director of communications at Humber, said the cause of the outage is still being investigated. However, electrical lines running to the residence buildings were damaged and it could be a possible reason for the blackout.

Leopold said students are encouraged to talk to their professors to let them know about the situation.

Nora Esperanza, manager of residence for Humber north, said “if the students reached out to us, because their faculty weren’t able to make any accommodations because of this, we would definitely confirm it was due to the power outage.”

Second floor hallway of T building with minimal light. Photo by Aleema Ali.

She added students were advised early yesterday to go to campus to charge their laptops, phones, and buy food.

John Kennedy, a second year radio broadcast student, did not get the memo fast enough.

“It’s been rather inconvenient. I missed a test because I couldn’t do the online stuff. I tried to run to the school and my laptop died as I started it,” Kennedy said.

He added elevators shut down for a while as well, with people stuck in them.

With no power, also comes no hot water. Students had to find alternate means of showering this morning.

“I tried. I got in this morning and quickly screamed and got out,” John said.

He said he’s waited a lot longer than a day to shower, and the trek to S building isn’t worth it.


Esperanza said they are doing everything they can to get the power fully restored, and they have had generators on site since 7 a.m. this morning.