Computers, lights, and appliances of all sorts clicked off yesterday as a power failure swept across the Medford/Somerville campus around 1:30 p.m. According to Mass Electric - the company that supplies power to Tufts - the blackout was caused when an underground cable malfunctioned.
Most of the Tufts campus is served via a "tap" on the faulty cable, which runs beneath Main St. in Medford. The exact cause of the cable failure is unknown, according to Mass Electric spokeswoman Jackie Berry, but Mass Electric was able to reroute and restore power approximately half an hour later.
The broken cable is still shut down, but Mass Electric says that this will have little effect on the stability of Tufts' electric feeds.
Because of the size and complexity of Mass Electric's system, power failures such as the one that occurred yesterday are inevitable, Tufts Energy manager Betsy Isenstein said.
"It's never the same thing twice," she said. "It's a big complicated system, and they're always going to be different parts failing."
All academic buildings and large dorms - including Tisch Library and Eaton Hall - lost power, according to Tufts University Police Department (TUPD) Captain Mark Keith.
The Tufts Administration Building (TAB) and most wood-frame houses are served by another company, NStar, and were not affected. Though Berry said the cable failures only occur occasionally, Mass Electric maintains multiple routes for power to minimize the duration of outages.
Even though electricity was only out for 30 minutes, students found the interruption irritating. While freshman Kara Kelly was happy that her computer class was cancelled, she quickly discovered that she could not proceed with her day.
"It was pretty annoying," she said. "The rest of the work I had to do today was library research, but [the library] shut down. It kind of delayed everything by another hour."
The library has a policy of evacuating during power outages for public safety reasons.
Another freshman's computer crashed during the outage and she lost her lab report. Junior Leah Rosales was in class when the power went out, but the professor decided to continue lecturing in the emergency lights. In the nice weather, she questioned the source of the problem.
"[Outages] happened last year a couple of times," she said. "I just don't understand why it happens."
A rash of power outages swept campus last spring, when multiple electricity problems interrupted students during the last month of the semester. But the incidents were unrelated and were repaired with relative ease, and no plans were made to alter the campus electrical system.
Factors such as storms, aging electric equipment, small animals, and contractors damaging power lines caused the recurrent outages.
