Juan Villa / The Collegian

He was finally home from a nine-hour day at work. When he least expected it, he got a phone call at 9 p.m.

“We have an emergency down here,” a Fresno State police officer said. “The lights are down in lots K, L and along Barstow. Can you come?”

As the rain poured down, he managed to fix three-fourths of the lights that were out. He finished at midnight. Although it was too dangerous to restore every light, the job was completed the next day.

They jokingly call him the “master electrician” because turning Fresno State on starts with him. Most students might think that light bulbs, electrical outlets and pole lights around campus are nothing but voltages and watts. But for Gabriel Valencia, that’s his job.

Valencia has been working at Fresno State’s Plant Operations for 13 years. He is the supervisor of the electrical shop which fixes and maintains anything from the high voltage that feeds the campus’ main volt distribution, to the individual lights that keep classrooms bright.

When he arrives to work in the morning, he goes to a wooden cabinet that’s outside the Plant Operations building. The slot that’s labeled “electricians” is filled with work orders for electrical problems that need to be fixed around campus.

“Conley Art building, room 101; about 10 lights out,” was one of the many problems on a recent Wednesday.

Since there are different colors that lamps put out, Valencia examines the ballasts, which are used to stabilize the current flow of lamps, so he knows what lamps to use. Yellow lighting is high pressure sodium and white light is metal highlight or mercury vapor, which are the lamps used along roads like Barstow Avenue.

“If a [tower’s light] lens is cracked, birds will go into where the lights are and build nests,” Valencia said. “The [bird nests] sometimes catch on fire because it gets so hot.”

The tower had gone out at the tennis courts during practice on a Tuesday night, so Terry Logan, director of athletics facilities, called the Plant Operations receptionist, who contacted Valencia on his radio and told him there was a problem and that they need it up and running for the game over the weekend.

“Even if there’s a day game, we still have to worry about score boards,” Logan said. “Gabe’s my hero.”

When the threat of global power outage in Y2K filled many people with fear, he was on campus, along with a team of others, all night, so that if the power did go out he would do his best to fix the problem.

“People don’t realize that one time we had a lot of rain and we had water going into a switch gear and it knocked down half the campus [electricity] over the weekend,” Valencia said. “We had it back up by Monday.”

It would seem easy to say he gets electricity up and makes it work, but his most challenging yet gratifying success required more than maintenance.

There was a high voltage generator located in front of the California Water Institute building on Barstow Avenue and Chestnut Avenue. It was called Well 6 and it fed the campus’ water supply. Valencia and his co-workers reassembled 12,000 volts from Well 6 to the new water well by Savemart Center in order to properly re-feed building pumps and lights.

“When we can do it, we’ll handle it,” Valencia said. “We save the campus a lot of money that way.”About a month ago, Valencia, along with a team of other electricians, had to shut down half of the campus in order to bring the new library from temporary power to normal power. They had to change all of the switchgear because it needed maintenance. They tightened all of the electrical connections and they needed a specialist to come in and check the breakers.

“We were here all night,” Valencia said. “This campus has a lot of emergencies that we take care of.”