Darkness envelops buildings due to power grid problems

Residents of Stouffer, Van Pelt and Harrison college houses lost power for several hours during the early morning yesterday when a portion of the campus power grid went down. While the electricity was restored again by about 6 a.m., some smaller locations, such as WXPN, St Mary's Episcopal Church and the Carriage House, did not get power until between 10:30 a.m. and noon. According to Director of Campus Maintenance and Facilities Services Mike Coleman, the outage was caused by a failed underground line connection. "We had a ground fault in a manhole [near] 38th and Spruce," he said. A ground fault is when electricity jumps from a circuit to a ground and the circuit blows. The failure occurred at 3:45 a.m. Tuesday morning and backup power was running in most buildings by 6:30 a.m. As of yesterday afternoon, it was unclear why this particular connection failed. It took several hours to get the backup power going because in older buildings, like the high rises, it has to be switched on manually. The failed connection was fixed by the evening. Maintenance personnel worked for approximately three hours to switch the affected buildings that had a manual switch over to the backup line. "In essence, between the hours of 3:45 and 6:30, the buildings we could switch over, we did," Coleman said. But some of the smaller buildings, such as St. Mary's Episcopal Church and WXPN, are not connected to a secondary power line. These buildings had to be provided with backup generators, which was finished between 10:30 a.m. and noon yesterday. While this may seem a long time to flick switches to restore power to the larger buildings, Coleman said that this response time is good considering all the safety precautions that must be followed when working with electricity. "You're dealing with 13,000 volt lines here," he explained. "It's not just as simple as going in and going, OOkay, line A, line B.'" Students working during the power outage had to use emergency lights to study. Engineering senior Jason De Gaetano was studying for an exam when the lights went out. "I had to go down into the lobby to study," he said. However, De Gaetano shared Coleman's opinion that the response time was good. "It was pretty quick actually," he said. Also affected by the line failure were the Rosenthal Building -- part of the Veterinary School -- and the Levy Center for Oral Health Research, among others. The bad connection was expected to be fixed early yesterday evening.