Power outage affects several campus buildings

By Michael Falcone and Neal Narahara

Daily Bruin Senior Staff

Power was shut off in eight north-campus buildings late
Wednesday afternoon as Facilities Management attempted to locate a
glitch that could have threatened power elsewhere.

The planned outage, which affected Powell Library, the Plasma
Physics building, the Faculty Center, the old Career Center
building, and Kinsey, Knudsen, Moore and Schoenberg halls, lasted
for roughly an hour between 4 and 5 p.m., disrupting classes and
displacing students working in the library.

“Throughout the library there were notices, so people knew
what they were going to do,” said Karen Chang, a lab
consultant at Powell Library.

At 1 p.m., Chang said she and other library staff received an
e-mail warning them of the outage. Students cooperated when asked
to leave at about 3:45 p.m., and returned the 30 laptops that the
College Library Instructional Computing Commons lab loans out each
day, she said.

“I didn’t hear any complaints, and people were
really good about bringing back their laptops on time.”

The problem was eventually found in a circuit between the old
Career Center and Knudsen Hall.

“We went down at about 4, and we were able to identify the
problem and re-feed the buildings from alternate routes,”
said Jack Powazek, assistant vice chancellor for Facilities
Management.

Initially, the problem was isolated in one of three 4,800-volt
feeder circuits, affecting 13 buildings including the eight that
lost power.

According to Powazek, after further investigation, power had to
be shut off in these buildings in order to safely find the problem
and was done early enough for a repair crew to fix the problems
while there was still daylight, if necessary.

Had the problem been a significant one and not been fixed, it
could have caused an unexpected outage, which could have affected
even more buildings.

Although several classes were affected, the impact was
relatively minimal due to the buildings affected and the time of
day, Powazek said.

“There are about 200 general assignment classrooms
campus-wide and only a few of those were affected,” he
said.

In addition to the eight buildings which were affected, Murphy
Hall and the School of Law posted official notices of the outage,
but were not included in the shut-down.

Jennifer Hill, an access services librarian at The Hugh and
Hazel Darling Law Library, said she arrived there at 3 p.m., an
hour before signs said the shutdown would occur, but the lights
stayed on.

“When I came in I saw a sign about the outage, and when I
walked in the door everybody was unplugging their computers and
preparing,” Hill said. “But nothing ever happened; they
restarted the server and everybody plugged their computers back
in.”