Power outage blamed on component failure
On Jan. 31, at approximately 3:30 p.m., a power failure cut off electricity and services to about half of the campus.
Buildings affected were Rayzor Hall, Sewall Hall, Physics Laboratories, Lovett Hall, Dell Butcher Hall, the Central Plant, Brown College, the Brown House, Jones College, Abercrombie Lab and the Computational Engineering Building construction site.
Facilities and Engineering had committed to restoring power in the residential colleges no later than midnight, and power was restored by 8:30 p.m.
To restore services to the colleges, power had to be temporarily cut from O'Connor House, home of President Malcolm Gillis, and from the Jones House. Should it have been impossible to restore power by midnight, emergency generators would have been rented to power the colleges.
Several students were inconvenienced by the power outage.
"It was a massive inconvenience to people at Jones. Thank God that they finally got power restored," Jones President Rick Lopez said.
Some, however, enjoyed the shortage. "It was kind of cool ... we got to light candles, and it felt somewhat pagan, like a seance," Jones senior Portia Hawks said.
A major concern related to the outage was the chemistry lab sessions conducted in the late afternoon.
The majority of sessions had to be canceled midway and rescheduled, leading to vocal student opposition.
Brown College freshman Noelle Berryman was one of those affected by the rescheduled lab sessions. "Not only did I have to wait around in a powerless lab room for an unproductive additional hour. ... I had to waste a perfectly wonderful, snowy afternoon in Chem Lab completing titrations. Also, I had to walk across campus in brutally cold weather just to have dinner," she said.
The outage was caused by a failure in the busway system of the 5,000-volt distribution system in the Central Plant. A missed connection in the copper conducting bus bars led to a meltdown in the copper network. The system had to be turned off to correct the problem.
The other academic buildings and the main quadrangle of colleges were unaffected since the campus is powered by two separate systems.
While the two can be tied together, doing so would have resulted in a loss of power for the entire campus.
Instead, electricians had to search the entire system for the missed connection.
"The [F&E] staff, in particular the electricians, supervised by Sylvester Cantu, did an admirable job," F&E Maintenance Manager Russell Price said.
"They worked non-stop basically ... and we were able to fully restore power to all buildings by 12:30 a.m.," he said.
Another outage is being scheduled to repair the circuit breaker for Mudd Lab.
The same buildings will be affected at that time.
Price also clarified that this outage is unrelated to one the previous Saturday which affected both Jones buildings and was caused by a bird shorting out the lightning arrestor.
"This is not an unreliable system," Price said.
"In my 30 years of technical experience, this is my first experience of a failure of an electrical busway distribution system.
"They just don't happen that often. ... We plan to take precautionary measures [and] institute regular system checks," he said.
This item appeared in the News section of the February 9, 1996 issue.
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