Campus officials constantly preach safety.

Yet for nearly a month, a breakdown in communication has left Broomfield Road and Washington Street in the dark.

Perhaps a powerless streetlight isn’t as urgent as a home’s power flow, but significantly darker roads render students even more vulnerable to those deplorable acts about which campus police so often warn us.

A gas line repair resulted in more than a dozen powerless streetlights on Broomfield Road and Washington Street.

Though the gas line repairmen supposedly reported the problem to Consumers Energy, nobody at Consumers noticed.

Though Dan Lehr, electrical and maintenance mechanics supervisor, said he attempted to contact Consumers Energy for an update, nobody at Consumers noticed.

Fault lies on both sides.

Lehr should have made more concerted attempts to demand Consumers repair the lights. He said he placed a message roughly two weeks ago – yet only one message, especially when that message generates no reply, is an insufficient response to a major outage.

Yes, Consumers likely had its hands full. Yes, it is fully reasonable to expect some delay in response. But two weeks – and this was after two weeks had passed since engineers supposedly had placed the initial repair request – is too long, especially with the notable improvement in Mount Pleasant weather.

At this point Lehr should have become more proactive. An additional phone call could have cleared up an issue that went unnoticed until this newspaper contacted Consumers for information.

If Lehr’s claims are true, then Consumers also should revamp its response service. The automated answering service, which Lehr described as a prioritization machine, now has overlooked a major issue.

This should serve to exemplify the necessity of ensuring a system that permits nothing to sneak through the cracks – even if the stress of an exceptionally horrid winter generates an unusually high number of cracks.

CMU waited, though far too passively, for Consumers to respond, and generally had good faith in the company’s response system.

Yet that faith was misguided. Consumers should closely examine its system, find out how this particular case went unnoticed and revise its procedure as is necessary.

Neither party can be accused of bad faith, of course. Both had good intent, but it’s the overarching negligence that is infuriating.

As students constantly are encouraged to not travel alone and to be aware of their surroundings, they expect administrators – and power companies – to maintain some level of vigilance of their own.

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