Last night about 9:10 p.m. as I was working in my office the power suddenly went dead. We are used to the occasional rolling brown out in Newlands so at first I just sat there for a moment expecting the power to pop back on any second. The college has emergency lighting and after a few seconds it was clear this wasn't something that would pop back on any moment and I started to wander the campus checking rooms and making sure that no one was stuck somewhere in the complete dark. About ten minutes into the blackout it was evident that this wasn't going to be a short one and so we ended classes early sending everyone home. I had called home to Katie who told me the blackout was affecting Red Bay as well and that it had awoken Arianna. After getting everyone on campus off safely and making sure the radio station was unplugged and all the A/C's along with as many lights as we could switch off were turned off, I headed home. It was weird driving home as everything was dark except for the car headlights. The power outage seemed to be island wide.
I got home to a dark house that was quickly heating up with no air flow. All we had for light were flashlights and the upstairs was too hot to get Arianna settled down. We decided to bring Arianna down stairs where it was cooler and set up sheets and pillows on the tile floor as well as her pack and play. It wasn't so much that the house was hot as it was there was no air flow from the fans and that makes the heat stifling. Arianna was freaked out and didn't understand what was going on. We tried rocking her and shushing her but she was very disturbed by how dark it was. We opened the downstairs blinds because the near full moon gave us some good ambient light. The power outage lasted almost an hour after I got home finally coming back on around 10:45. It was a short dry run for what it might be like during a hurricane if we do lose power. We definitely learned that we need to have flashlights in every room and some battery powered fans for air flow. We found out this morning that the outage was over most of the island and caused by a truck accident right near CUC's power plant in the industrial park. Last night was Arianna's first Caribbean style black out and hopefully isn't something she gets to repeat these next few weeks during the height of hurricane season.
