Outage lasted seconds before backup started Blackout_4.9_vnd

Tae Furui was working in the computer lab in the basement of Lentz Hall Thursday afternoon when a blip in the power caused the lights to go out and the screens of the 16 computers to go dark.

“There were two students using the computers, and with the blackout we had to restart all the computers,” said Furui, a senior in biological sciences.

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She said the darkness lasted for less than a minute, but the sudden outage surprised them and caused the students to lose some of their work.

The power outage happened campus-wide at about 3:30 p.m., the result of a part failure in the switchyard that provides power to the entire campus, according to Brad Dillard, associate director of facilities for the Physical Plant.

“Ameren CIPS is our electrical provider, and they had a part fail in the main switchyard just south of Wright Hall,” Dillard said. “And they’ll be in the process of repairing it, but the system is designed to automatically go to backup components.”

Dillard said the backup components worked perfectly, restarting the campus after about 5 to 8 seconds. Dillard said Ameren CIPS should have the part repaired after tomorrow.

Vaidehi Chitre, a graduate student, was a teaching assistant for a cinema and photography class in Lawson Hall 151 when the power went out.

“We were showing films and that’s when it happened,” Chitre said. “The film just stopped running, actually.”

Despite the unexpected interruption, she said the students did not get too rowdy and hardly anyone took the opportunity to slip out.

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Across the lawn in Life Science III, Ankrehah Trimble, a first-year med prep student, was taking her last organic chemistry test of the year.

Trimble said the room made a collective noise of surprise, but the students were forced to resume their exams as soon as the backup system took effect. She said they had assumed it was simply a building problem and did not realize it spanned the whole campus.

Dillard said the Physical Plant received a lot of calls from people reporting the outage and wondering what happened.

“We still have people out responding to it because it knocked our boilers in our steam room here offline, and they provide our air conditioning to some parts of campus, so some of the buildings lost their air,” Dillard said.

Dillard said they were working to get the boilers back online, and expected to have that completed Thursday evening.