Power Outage Forces Early Dismissal at High School, School on Tuesday

Students at were dismissed early Monday due to a power outage, which also forced postponement of the ’s regular business meeting originally scheduled for Monday evening at the school, officials said.

But while there was some concern that school would have to be cancelled Tuesday, Interim Superintendent of Schools Steven Engravalle told Patch Monday evening that's not likely to be the case.

"As of right now, it appears everything will be fine," Engravalle said "School will go off as scheduled, and there won’t be an issue."

Engravalle also said, "As of 7:32 p.m. [Monday], all systems are go; we have such a good staff."

Superintendent of Buildings and Grounds Jack Denichilo told Patch Monday evening, “We really don’t know what happened.”

“We thought it was a lightning strike,” Denichilo said. “My office is on the ground floor, and it faces the courtyard. And at the time, when we saw the lights go out, the lightening lit up that whole courtyard. I don’t know if it hit the building, but it must have created a power surge, which blew out the breaker to the main panel, and then we had PSE&G come in, and we tried to eliminate one thing at a time. And then we called our electrician, and he came in, and he powered up the school again.”

Denichilo said power was restored at about noon, and that “it’s held all through the day.”

He also said the school’s electrician would be back “first thing in the morning [Tuesday].”

“What they’re going to do is a diagnostic,” Denichilo said. “They’re going to take some kind of infrared readings to see if there’s any weak spots or hot spots in the electrical panel. We should have power, but we’re monitoring it.”

Denichilo added, “But right now, we have power; there should be no problem with school tomorrow, and we’ll go from there.”

Earlier in the day, Engravalle said, “We had originally heard from PSE&G that it was a transformer issue on their end."

"Upon further investigation, they contacted us and let us know that there could have been a lightning strike or something else onto one of our main transformers,” Engravalle said, adding that students at the high school were being dismissed at 12:32 p.m., and that the BOE meeting was likely to be rescheduled for Wednesday, May 30.

“But right now we’re dealing with the emergency issues,” Engravalle said at the time.

“While it was restored temporarily, I don’t know if that’s going to stay,” Engravalle said. “They’re going to be doing repairs, potentially, so they may have just put a stopgap in. My biggest concern right now is, will we be with effective power for school tomorrow?”

He added, “My hope is that we will, but that’s what I’m watching most closely because that’s really the bigger issue.”

Engravalle said the students won’t have to make up the day because they completed a full four hours of school Monday, and that the current plan is to make up the school board meeting on May 30 because school is closed on May 28 and May 29 for Memorial Day and an unused snow day, respectively. But he said official word of the rescheduled meeting would be forthcoming.

As for the school board meeting, Engravalle said Monday evening, "We havent even disussed it."

"We were handling the mergency," he said. "That was the top priority."

“We had police officers at the building,” Engravalle said earlier in the day of Monday’s power outage. “No power means no fire alarms. We had a fire truck stationed at the school. Fire officials were notified; they helped us out to make sure if there was an emergency onsite. We had limited communications at the school so it was just best that we let [the students] out early.”

Patch will provide updates as more information becomes available.