Several buildings on Carleton’s campus had problems after power and wireless internet went out for about half of the campus around 10:15 a.m. on Sept. 19.
Residence Commons and all the residence buildings were without juice, as were the St. Patrick’s Building and Dunton Tower. Power was restored by 11:30 a.m. for most of the campus, while MacOdrum Library, the River Building, and Loeb continued suffering power outages.
Power was fully restored across campus by 3 p.m. according to university safety.
“We had a fault on one of our high voltage cables,” said Darryl Boyce, assistant vice-president of facilities management and planning at Carleton. “It tripped a break in our substation which tripped a breaker at Hydro Ottawa substation.”
“So we got Hydro Ottawa down and we determined where the fault was. Once we did that we just sort of left that faulty piece of line out of the circuit and fed from another direction.”
The problem didn’t seem to be anything that was out of the ordinary, Boyce said. “It’ll happen in a high voltage distribution system and it’s one of our main feeders that seems to have had some sort of a fault.”
In the new River Building, emergency lighting was out for an hour in the morning during the power outage, leaving stairwells in complete darkness. There is an emergency lighting system in place for River Building, Boyce said.
“So something needs to be fixed and we’ll do that,” he said.
