By Alexis Ramsey
Round Table reporter

On the 11th anniversary of September 11th Middletown High School had a power outage. Luckily the black out was not an insidious plot to cause a power shortage on the entire Eastern Seaboard, it was just old wiring in the parking lot.

At about 12:30 the lights in most of the school flickered out and only half of them came back on. To find out what was causing the shortage the electrical company had to turn off all electricity to the school, which was the reason why the power was shut off again in fourth period.

They found that only two of three phases that allow electricity to run through the school had turned back on. This allowed maintenance to pin point the problem to wiring under the parking lot.

The shortage occurred because of, “old electrical wires that, through normal ware and tear, had fizzled out” said Michael Watson in an interview.

Watson also said that this “happens regularly at schools” which is not very comforting. However the issue has been solved and Watson said that there should be no more problems with computers or other hardware.

While being interviewed Watson explained the procedures for a power outage or any safety concern in the school.

“There’s a calling tree that all Frederick County Schools have to follow, we call the Head of Security for the entire county and then he notifies all the people below that need to hear about it.”

Watson was planning to do an extended evacuation to “kill two birds with one stone” since all Frederick Schools have to perform the drill within the first few months of the new year and the electricity had to be turned back off anyway, but he didn’t want to cause anymore alarm since it was Sept. 11th.

Watson added that the whole school did a wonderful job dealing with the power outage. “There were a lot of staff members who were on planning that offered to help so we went out and located rooms that might be too dark so we could move the students to empty rooms.”

Watson concluded by saying, “the students and staff handled it amazingly, they always rise to the occasion.”

If there are any other concerns or hardware malfunctions, please report them to administration.