Several residence halls, classrooms and administrative buildings at the University of Colorado at 麻豆影院 were without power for four and one-half hours in the early morning hours on Wednesday, Aug. 29, making some students late for early classes but not affecting most of the 3,967 students in the 15 affected halls.
Power went off for the 15 halls, three dining rooms and the other buildings at about 2:45 a.m. and was not restored until about 7:30 a.m. Power for steam and chilled water, which provides heating and hot water for residence halls and other buildings and also chills water for air conditioning, will be restored at about 2 p.m. today.
The outage did make some students late getting out of their residence halls for class, said Deb Coffin, assistant vice chancellor for student affairs and executive director of campus Housing. "They had to shower in the dark and get themselves ready with no power available." The dining staff arranged a continental breakfast in place of the normal full breakfast for early risers.
However, many students would not have noticed the outage unless they had 8 a.m. classes. Most students were waking up about the time the power was restored, Coffin said.
CU-麻豆影院's new text-messaging system, called RAVE, was used to alert subscribers of the outage. Officials said one reason the system was used was because it was the first week of school and thousands of new campus residents are not aware of what to do during a power outage.
John Morris, director of Facilities Operations, said the outage was caused by an electric cable failure "that tripped off the electrical system between the campus Power House and the Engineering Center complex. As far as we know, there's no relationship between this power failure and a previous outage that occurred in mid-July."
Affected residence halls included Baker, Libby, Farrand, Brackett, Crosman, Cockerell, Reed, Hallett, Willard, Cheyenne Arapaho, Andrews, Buckingham, Smith and the Kittredge West Halls. Farrand, Libby and Kittredge Commons dining operations also were impacted.
Other buildings affected by the outage, which was less critical because of the time of day the outage occurred, included Regent Administrative Center, 914 Broadway and 924 Broadway, Wolf Law Building, Fine Arts, Environmental Design, Coors Events/Conference Center, Ketchum, Imig Music Building, Fiske, Planetarium and the Sommers-Bausch Observatory.