On the morning of Tuesday, Nov. 14, 18 campus buildings abruptly went dark due to a power outage.

After an extensive infrastructure investigation, Facilities Management determined the source of the outage, which affected buildings in the Hill and central campus area, to be associated with construction at the Library renovation site. Several departments work closely with contractors to prevent such instances, but with an ever-evolving campus, sometimes accidents happen. 

“There are many moving parts and pieces to managing daily operations alongside of construction activities on a campus of our size," said Mark Demyanek, assistant vice president of Facilities Management - Operations and Maintenance.

The outage happened at 9:40 a.m. Between then and 11:40 a.m., when approximately half of the buildings got power back, Facilities personnel checked 10 different switches at the transformer level. Once the team had a better idea of the proximity of the fault location, they then checked six manholes to identify the specific cable where the fault occurred.

The last section of electrical delivery infrastructure was turned on around 4:30 p.m., once all affected buildings and safety issues were assessed.

"Occasionally, the perils of construction overcome our best efforts to keep up the balancing act," Demyanek said. "We apologize to the campus community for the inconveniences caused by the power disruption, and we want to reassure everyone that our underground electrical distribution system is very resilient and reliable."