Blackout on South 40 causes student distress

| Contributing Reporter

Students found themselves showering in the dark and trapped in the elevator when a power outage struck campus Monday morning.

The outages occurred at around 8 a.m. and continued for a little over an hour throughout various buildings. To restore power to the South 40, electricians fromAmerenUE, Washington University’s electricity provider, had to manually switch over to generators.

The blackout hit residential buildings on the South 40 the hardest, disrupting student routines to varying degrees. Maintenance Operations has not yet identified the cause of the outage.

Some areas of the Danforth campus, including the east side, which also experienced outages, have automatic switching gears that respond after substantial periods of interruption and don’t require manual activation.

Central areas on the South 40, such as Bear’s Den and administrative offices, were hooked up to these automatic transfer switches, meaning their power wasn’t completely shut off like the residential buildings.

“The lights flickered off and stayed off for about a minute,” freshman Emily Williams, who was waiting in line at Cherry Tree Cafe during the incident, said. “Everything kind of froze.”

“Students in two different buildings were stuck in elevators, so maintenance had to respond to that,” Bill Wiley, director of Maintenance Operations, said.

“Maintenance isn’t aware of any damage done to campus from the outages, but there may have been significant interruptions in research that have not yet been brought to our attention,” he added.

Wiley said that more information about the exact cause of the incident is still to come.

He added that the automatic generators experienced a few minor issues as well. Multiple hoods in the kitchen of Bear’s Den and two air conditioning cooling units in the Washington University Police Department office did not seem to be hooked up to the generators, he said.

Although several students took to social media to express their frustration at the disruption to their schedules, sophomore Adam Kleiman felt the outage was blown out of proportion.

“No real complaints from me except that I couldn’t make coffee, but otherwise I thought that most people overreacted to the power outage,” Kleiman said. “Power was out for like an hour, and people acted like the world was ending.”

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