Carlmont canceled school amid widespread power outages.
In an email sent to Carlmont students and families early Wednesday morning, Principal Gay Buckland-Murray announced that school would be closed for the day because of an unresolved power outage.
On Tuesday, students had gone about a largely regular day at school until the power went out during lunch at around 12 p.m. Despite the outage, the day concluded as usual. Disruptions to normalcy arose when regularly scheduled sports practices, like track and field and swimming, were canceled for the day.
The power outages were not exclusive to Carlmont; as the storm raged through the Bay Area with winds up to 97 mph, increasing numbers of residents were affected.
At the outage’s peak, it was reported that about 200,000 Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) customers across Northern California were without power, with a majority of them living in the South Bay.
Though PG&E hasn’t released an official report on the outages, it is largely suspected that they are due to falling power lines as a result of the gusty winds in Tuesday’s storm.
Of the seven high schools in the Sequoia Union High School District, only two schools, Carlmont and Sequoia, closed for the day. Districts throughout the Bay Area, like the Cupertino Union School District and Fremont Union School District, among others, also decided to close some, if not all, of their schools for the day.
Though PG&E added an interactive map on its website with location-specific outage information, Carlmont’s restoration time had yet to be announced as of 10:11 a.m. on Wednesday, March 15.
In her email, Buckland-Murray added that Thursday’s schedule would be altered from an odd-period block day to a “regular 1-7 day.”
*This is a breaking news story. The article will be updated with more information.
