How to Survive a Dorm Blackout: Important Tips

Imagine waking up, in your college dorm room, with no electricity, no heat or air running, no hot water, no internet, and no lights. All you have is an emergency light in the hallway, letting you know the way to EXIT, nothing else. This is a bit of a befuddling experience, and one that can cause a few problems for the typical college student. I woke up today to this very problem, as a machine had broken and ended up flooding my dorms basement, shortening out all of the electricity in the dorm.

It was rather confusing-I went to bed with the heater on, wooing me to sleep over the noise of the music and hallway chatter from my peers, but awoke with a start to silence later on in the wee hours of the morning. It took me awhile to understand why I had awakened, and then, after getting up, I found out why-the dorms had blacked out. The silence was rather unusual, as anyone who has ever lived on a campus will tell you that it's rarely ever that quiet, even late at night or in the early morning. I stumbled out into the hall, and found it dark, nay, not just dark, but pitch black.

Obviously, living in a rather modern country like the USA has its benefits, and one of these is that power can be restored pretty fast in the event of an outage. This was the case at my school too, but the workers did not arrive until after the sun was up, and many people with early morning classes missed them. Quite a few others tripped up or fell painfully down the stairs when trying to navigate them in the dark. I'm very happy for a few precautions I took that helped me, and several of my friends who were prepared for events like this.

First off, always have a flashlight in your dorm room. There is nothing like trying to find the bathroom in the dark with no light-I'm uber thankful I had a flashlight, a hand-crank one (pretty cheap, and surprisingly easy to use) that I had left around.

Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, have a battery operated alarm for crying out loud! Don't rely on some plug-in-and-chug-el-cheapo setup that will fail and when the power goes out! Perhaps missing class isn't a big deal, and for a lot of people it isn't. However, if the power goes out before a big test, or an important review, and your proff is apt to be rather harsh, power or no power, then make the switch, and at the very least use your cell as an alarm.

Lastly, grab some ear plugs, and keep 'em by the bed. The power outage on my campus sent several outage alarms in an internet network room near mine off, and these were really annoying-it was quite hard to fall back asleep. Ear plugs are a lifesaver, especially on a campus.

Hopefully, these simple tips help save at least one person some time and frustration. As they say, you can thank me later.