Electric power was out early Friday afternoon across Cornell and Tompkins County after wet, heavy snowfall. The outage lasted about half an hour in most of Cornell, from about noon to 12:30 p.m.
As of 1:30 p.m., 50,610 customers of New York State Electric and Gas were without electricity across New York State, including 7,595 in Tompkins County, according to Find Energy.
Campus coffee shops like Goldie’s Café and Temple of Zeus temporarily closed during the outage because they were unable to process orders. Okenshields and Toni Morrison Dining also temporarily closed and turned students away at the door. As of 1:45 p.m., Goldie’s was reopened.
A handful of students waited to enter the Cocktail Lounge during the outage, as the loss of power took down the card readers.
Some professors canceled class during the outage, while others pressed on, according to several posts on Sidechat and interviews with students. Aidan Quinn ’28 and Jack Eisenbrown ’28 told The Sun that their professors said they were required to cancel classes for fire safety reasons.
Mike DiGrado ’25 was in an environmental psychology class in Uris Hall when the lights went out around noon.
“I was in class and the lights flickered and then turned off. Some people screamed, [and] some people were like, ‘What?’ They came back on for a sec and then turned off, and so the professor canceled class,” DiGrado said. “I just walked back to West, and all of campus was dark. I couldn’t even take the elevator, so I walked up the stairs to my dorm.”
Akshitha Kumar ’28 was in Catherwood Library trying to review her notes before a quiz.
“I was [scared] for a quick second cause it was all black for a few seconds, and I was on my own in the hallway,” Kumar said.
Not all buildings were affected. North Campus’s Ecology House did not lose power at all, and the Collegetown Bagels locations in Collegetown and downtown Ithaca lost power for less than a minute. On the other hand, the Schwartz Performing Arts Center did not regain power until about 1:20 p.m.
A National Weather Service snow gauge in Northeast Ithaca measured 2.5 inches of snowfall at 11:30 a.m. While Ithaca saw neither high winds nor large accumulations of snow, the wet snow — produced as temperatures hovered above the freezing point Thursday night into Friday morning — was heavy enough to snap branches and power lines.
Aryan Batada ’28 is a Sun contributor and can be reached at [email protected].