Tuesday morning, a power outage darkened twelve main campus buildings.
The problem occurred when a transformer in the soon-to-be-completed Royden B. Davis Performing Arts Center failed, University spokesperson Julie Green Bataille said.
According to Bataille, the outage lasted from approximately 8:00 a.m. to 10:15 a.m., cutting out all electricity in Village C West, Harbin, Healy and the ICC, among other buildings.
“The problem was fixed with the installation of a temporary transformer and switch,” Bataille said. “A replacement transformer and switch gear will be manufactured and installed as soon as they are ready.”
Facilities officials would not comment on the cause of the transformer failure.
All classes within the ICC had begun when the electricity shut down. Assistant economics professor Robert Hussey had just started his lecture in macroeconomic theory when all the lights went off.
“I didn’t know what it was,” he said. Professor Hussey let his class out early. “It would have been possible to continue lecturing, but students wouldn’t have been able to take notes,” he said.
This wasn’t the case for freshman Zandra Gilmore (CAS ‘09), whose Chinese class in ICC 205B continued despite the power outage. “Everyone was kind of shocked because it was pitch black,” she said.
Gilmore said students lit the room with their cell phones, but there was not enough light to continue class, so they just sat there.
Both Hussey and Gilmore described the scene as calm. “Emergency lights went on in the hallways,” Gilmore said.
In their darkened classrooms, students blamed everything from the cold rain to the ICC’s solar-paneled roof for the source of the power outage, Gilmore said.
“All I know is that I took a cold shower in the dark,” Harbin resident John Bowen (MSB ‘09) said. Bowen said several students were late for classes when their alarms failed to go off.
University Registrar John Q. Pierce, who was in the ICC during the power outage, took it all in stride.
“We had classes a hundred years ago without electricity, and we can do it now.”
