BERKELEY (KRON) — Sarah Morris is a UC Berkeley PhD student who says PG&E’s power outage may have destroyed her important cancer research.
The $500,000 study involved work on treating drug resistant forms of the potentially deadly disease.
“I’m slowly processing what this means. At first it was a lot of anger. Now it’s just resignation,” Morris said.
Morris says the university was assured the Morgan Hall Lab was not going to be affected by the PG&E power outage.
But then she was left scrambling with only 12 hours to spare once PG&E decided they were in fact going to cut the power.
The cells in her study require specific temperature control and had to be moved quickly.
“You can’t just shut off power to a research institution. You shouldn’t even shut off power at a hospital. But we’re such a big and large institution, it just didn’t make sense,” she said.
The cells were moved to other tanks on the Cal campus and UCSF.
PG&E says it gave the university adequate notice of potential shutoffs and had “Frequent communications with these customers before, during and after,” the outage.
If Morris’ research is ruined, her academic and job careers maybe in jeopardy.
The almost two years of worth of work would have to begin all over again.
“It’s inconceivable that something like this like a power company can do this to an institution and I don’t know if they care,” Morris said.