Outage illuminates crisis plans

While University officials scrambled to collect cots and toiletries for displaced undergraduates in the hours after the Jan. 23 up-campus power outage, students were gathering items of their own. Rather than flashlights or sleeping bags, however, they were looking for laptops, iPods and musical instruments: ways to pass the time while their dorms remained dark.

What could have been a potential logistical nightmare — especially since the outage occurred during exam time and affected a large number of students — turned out to be a novel way for study-weary undergraduates to blow off steam during the final days of the fall term exam period.

More seriously, the outage served as a convenient, albeit unanticipated, large-scale test of the University's emergency response system.

As part of its emergency plans, the University had designated Dillon Gym as temporary housing for displaced students. Cots were stored in the building specifically for that purpose.

University officials, who estimated that about 550 students lived in dorms affected by the power outage, decided to set up 50 cots in Dillon, divided into two rooms by gender.

The estimate turned out to be high: Most students chose to stay in their rooms without power because heat had been restored, or they stayed with friends in unaffected dorms. Only two students chose to spend the night in Dillon.

Sophomores Denali Barron, Clint Montague, Dylan Alban and Mark Buettner set up camp in Dillon around midnight, well-prepared with pillows, guitar and a bongo drum. They had no intention of spending the night but instead joked with each other and bantered with Tom Dunne, the associate dean of undergraduate students, and Chad Klaus, the general manager for facilities services, who were supervising the sleeping area.

"I'm impressed at how well the University handled the situation and how well students took care of each other," Alban said.

The cots that had been set up were furnished with blankets and pillows, and the facilities department also removed prepackaged toiletry bags from storage containing basic supplies such as shampoo, toothpaste and soap.

"Everything is on an on-call basis," Dunne said of administrators' roles in the emergency response system.

When a crisis develops, he said, a specific plan of action is implemented based on the nature of the problem. Staff members must then carry out their respective tasks, staying well beyond regular business hours if necessary.

For many years, the University maintained a plan for the evacuation of individual buildings, University spokeswoman Cass Cliatt '96 said. But in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001 and Hurricane Katrina, which damaged college campuses in the Gulf Coast, the overall strategy was reevaluated to address incidents that affected entire campus regions.

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With the Jan. 23 outage, when power went out in 18 buildings stretching from Dillon Gym all the way to Holder Hall and West College, the regional response plan was activated and mobilized nearly 100 University staff members and administrators, Cliatt said.

University officials said they were pleased with their handling of the outage.

"The emergency itself is what you don't plan for," Cliatt said. "Things went rather smoothly, [but] you can't predict anything in an emergency. You plan for the unexpected, and that's what we responded to."

"We have had other occasions, including inclement weather, which have prompted us to enact our shelter program," Klaus said in an e-mail.

He added that this most recent experience was a more realistic disaster scenario, since many services such as power, wireless internet and room heating were disabled.

The outage was initially caused when a contractor installing a bollard outside Edwards Hall inadvertently struck an electric cable that serves three main electrical substations located in Dillon Gym and Joline and Edwards halls. Power should have been quickly restored because of built-in redundancies in the campus electrical system, Cliatt said.

One of the substations, however, was being serviced when the cable was struck.

Because the work on the substation required the temporary disconnection of the secondary system, upper campus experienced a total power loss that was not easy to repair quickly.

"It was a matter of unfortunate timing," Cliatt said. "Under any other circumstance, there would have been redundancy in the system."

Power was restored to most buildings as of 5 p.m. the same day, but Madison, Hamilton, Buyers, Blair, Campbell, Joline and Holder halls did not regain electrical service until 4:30 a.m. the next day.

Though the overall response to the situation was highly effective, Cliatt said, the University will seek to improve several trouble spots illuminated by the outage.

For one thing, many students returning to their rooms during the outage could not enter buildings because the prox card readers shut down after running out of auxiliary power.

Because the system automatically locks doors when it loses power, Public Safety officers were posted to open dormitory doors manually for students.

"That [is] one of the issues we are looking at [in the analysis of the response]," Cliatt said.

Another problem was that many students did not know where to find information about the problem.

"It doesn't seem that students are aware of the ALERT line, which they can call at any time for updates," Cliatt said.

The ALERT system provides recorded messages from Public Safety about emergency situations and is continually updated as changes occur. Students can reach it by dialing U-CALL and spelling out "alert."

"We always learn something new from these situations," Klaus said.