Power Outage Temporarily Displaces SMU Students
DALLAS (CBSDFW.COM) - Thousands of Southern Methodist University (SMU) students evacuated their dorms Tuesday evening after a campus wide power outage.
The university was able to restore electricity to five residence halls by 9 p.m., but most students had already relocated to nearby homes and hotels.
It was around 6:20 p.m. when students received a text message warning that "all on-campus personnel and residents must vacate the building by 7 p.m."
Student student, J.T. Bellin said, "We had about a half an hour from when they sent the message to evacuate the dorms so everything was very hectic."
The outage was the university's second in two months. Oncor, the company that delivers power to an SMU substation, said any power failure was within the SMU system, not its own.
SMU has not released information on the cause, but tweeted "this was not a planned outage."
An online petition calling for class to be cancelled Wednesday claimed "many students have midterms" and "cannot properly prepare."
"I was planning on using this time to study. And now I'm out here waiting for an Uber in the rain. And I don't even know if I have this test or the class in the morning," said Bellin.
By late Tuesday, the petition had received more than 5000 signatures.
Just before midnight SMU provost Steven Currall posted the following message on Twitter.
