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NIU Gunman: Short

A gunman attacked a geology class of 160 students at Northern Illinois University. The gunman shot twenty-one people before killing himself. Five people, plus the gunman, were killed.

NIU Gunman: Full

On Thursday, February 14, a gunman opened fire on a geology class of 160 students at Northern Illinois University. The gunman shot twenty-one people before killing himself. Five people, plus the gunman, were killed.

According to students in the classroom, the killer burst into the room from a side door, drew a shotgun, and started firing on the first couple of rows. Over fifty shots were fired from four weapons.

The gunman was later identified as Steven Kazmierczak, a former student of NIU. While Kazmierczak was an undergraduate at NIU, he was an "outstanding student" as well as an award-winning sociology student and a leader of a criminal justice group. However, authorities said that Kazmierczak had recently stopped taking his medication and had become erratic in the past couple of weeks.

Police later recovered an additional weapon from his apartment. Kazmierczak had a valid, state-required firearm identification card and thus had no problem purchasing the weapons. The authorities have found no motive in the shooting.

Northern Illinois University had revised their emergency procedures after the Virginia Tech massacre last April. The Northern Illinois campus will be closed until further notice. Numerous memorials and websites have been set up in the memory of the five slain victims.

Price Flooding: Short

The bottom floors of all four resident buildings in Price Hall flooded. A sewage drain clogged, causing water to back up into the rooms of the buildings in Price Hall. Of the four buildings in Price Hall, Thomas Hall was the most severely affected, with about three inches of water in the lounge.

Price Flooding: Long

Last Tuesday night around 7:30 p.m., the bottom floors of all four resident buildings in Price Hall flooded. A sewage drain clogged, causing water to back up into the rooms. Of the four buildings in Price, Thomas Hall was the most severely affected, with about three inches of water in the lounge. All of the rooms on the floor were flooded. In the other residence halls many rooms were affected, but in some cases the flooding was contained to the bathroom.

Campus Safety, Resident Life, and CUSA all contributed to easing the burden on the affected students. Within an hour and a half, Campus Safety had talked to students on all of the affected floors and maintenance had found and removed the clog despite having “a half hour of dead time” for the plumbers to make it back to campus.

As a safety precaution, all first floor residents were required to spend the night outside the dorm. In accordance with the University’s emergency action plan, Campus Safety gave the residents the option to sleep in the Barben rooms, providing pillows and blankets. Many displaced students opted to sleep in friends’ rooms, while a dozen students slept in Cheel. Jeremy Hermanntt, the Resident Director on duty told a group of students from Thomas, “Thomas is the first priority.”

Despite the heavy flooding, maintenance had cleared up the clog and cleaned up the floors enough for residents to return the next morning. CUSA president Kyle Snyder was in Cheel when the first students trickled in from the new dorms, and immediately began making preparations including setting up a video in Cheel Commons, and ordering pizza. Maintenance also cleaned all of the carpets that had been soaked by the flooding.

Blackout: Short

A mistake by an electrical engineer caused massive blackouts across wide swaths of the state. In an attempt to diagnose a damaged switch, the engineer disabled two protective devices designed to prevent cascading outages. The engineer has been suspended without pay. The blackouts affected or 13 percent of FPL's customers and as many as 3 million people.

Blackout: Full

A mistake by an electrical engineer caused Tuesday's massive blackouts across wide swaths of the state, Florida Power & Light announced Friday afternoon.

In an attempt to diagnose a damaged switch at a substation in Miami-Dade County, the engineer disabled two protective devices designed to prevent cascading outages, a violation of the utility's procedures. The engineer, a longtime employee whose name was not disclosed, has been suspended with pay.

The company and the Florida Reliability Coordinating Council, an industry group that enforces federal law, will continue their investigations, which may take months. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission may also launch an inquiry into what was one of the nation's largest blackouts since an Ohio power line outage in 2003 killed power to millions throughout the northeast.

"Without authorization, the engineer disabled two levels of relay protection," said FPL president Armando Olivera, as he gave details of the company's preliminary findings. "This was done contrary to FPL's standard procedures and established practices."

FPL already has made some interim changes, including providing more oversight of operations and providing "refresher" training to some employees. He declined to detail other changes.

Olivera clarified that the incident that was reported as a fire produced smoke and sounded like an explosion, but there were no flames.

The engineer "didn't realize the extent and magnitude of the problem," Olivera said. And even if the employee had known, there was nothing he could have done at that point because the shutdowns were automated by computers, he said.

The blackouts affected 584,000, or 13 percent, of FPL's customers and as many as 3 million people, Olivera said. About 90 percent of FPL customers had their lights back on within two hours.

Olivera said it doesn't appear there were any problems with FPL's infrastructure and maintenance procedures.

But federal regulators and energy experts say the finding of human error doesn't mean FPL is off the hook.

The utility's "frank disclosure helps speed the investigation of this serious incident," FERC Chairman Joseph T. Kelliher said in a statement Friday. "We continue to investigate the blackout to develop a full factual record on the cause or causes of the outage."

Based on FPL's statement, Rutgers University professor Frank Felder said it appears the engineer removed the relay when he knew he shouldn't.

"Overriding relay protection is a serious issue," Felder, director of the university's Center for Energy, Economic & Environmental Policy, wrote in an e-mail. "How was that person able to do so without anyone else knowing about it and preventing it?"

Turkey Point remains closed as FPL conducts mandatory inspections before restarting it and as FPL employees use the opportunity to do maintenance on the plant, said FPL nuclear chief Art Stall.