A campus-wide loss in power March 18 resulted in many class dismissals and lectures in the dark.

The power went out around 6:45 p.m. and professors and students said, didn’t return until about 7:30 p.m.

Chris Capra, a spokesman for SMUD, said that according to dispatch, the issue was not due to a SMUD power failure.

Sacramento State facilities did not respond in time for publication.

Professor Jason Geiger was teaching his English 197G class, Films of Great Directors, when the lights went out as he was starting a discussion. The emergency lights did come on, Geiger said, but it was only one light above the projector.

“Luckily, Mendocino (Hall) has a lot of windows so even though it’s a film room, we opened the curtains and had a discussion in a semi-dark classroom,” Geiger said.

After Geiger’s students returned from a short break, the electricity did return and he was able to resume class and show a film.

“It was an inconvenience and if it had lasted longer I would have had to dismiss students and it would have disrupted the syllabus. I was just lucky we had windows and the lights came on when they did,” Geiger said. Bobby Solorio, a student in Geiger’s class, said the outage was an inconvenience, especially around midterms and during evening classes which meet only once a week.

“When the power goes off at night and you have a test it gets pushed back and then that’s one more thing you have to worry about the next week,” said Solorio, a sophomore communication studies major.

Another student in Geiger’s class joked that because of the speeches on the budget cuts earlier in the day, the university had decided to not pay the electric bill due to the cuts.

“I hope it doesn’t become a regular feature,” Geiger said. “It’s one of those things that makes me think if we do build new classrooms, we should have lots of windows.”

Amanda Pollard can be reached at [email protected].