A brief power outage hit Tufts yesterday around noon, affecting a majority of buildings on the Hill. Most classes were undisturbed, but sighs arose from dozens of disappointed students working in Eaton Computer Lab.
"[The problem] was completely on the side of Massachusetts Electric," Energy Manager for Facilities Betsy Isenstein said. "It was a utility problem."
All buildings that receive power from the campus' main electric substation lost power from around 11:45 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
The outage was due to a faulty underground cable, according to National Grid spokesman David Graves. National Grid is the parent company of Massachusetts Electric.
"There was an underground cable close to our Wellington substation, right on the Medford-Malden line that failed and we lost power for approximately an hour and a half," he said.
According to Graves, approximately 2,600 customers were affected by the outage. The outages mostly took place along Middlesex Ave. in Medford, which is east of route 93 and north of the Mystic River.
Facilities administrators are hopeful that this outage was an anomaly. "I have no reason to believe that this is part of a larger problem," Isenstein said.
Students and professors adapted their lesson plans around the lack of power, relying on sunlight and chalkboards instead of fluorescent lamps and projected computer screens.
"Our class is in the basement where there are no windows, so my students had to take their tests up here [on the Olin lobby steps]," Chinese Professor Mingquan Wang said.
Power resumed in The Fletcher School just before a day-long conference, "Engaging in Dialogue on U.S. Foreign Policy," was due to begin. Police officers directed traffic through the pitch-black halls within the building with flashlights while the fire department worked to rescue passengers stuck in the elevators in Cabot.
The short blackout is the first that Tufts has experienced since the summer of 2002, when six outages occurred during the month of July.
The July 2002 blackouts were due to overused cables between the school and a Massachusetts Electric power station, according to Medford Facilities. Since then, two cables have been replaced and a third one was installed between Tufts and another power station.
There are also more generators on campus now than in July 2002, Isenstein said.
"One is a roll-up generator and is used only for an extended outage," since it takes an hour to set up, Isenstein said. "All other generators come on automatically."
The generators only power essential building functions, and do not provide power for all buildings.
"Every building does not have a generator," Isenstein said. "They are not meant for business as usual. They are meant for life safety."
Graves expects the repaired cable to hold up. "It has been repaired, obviously equipment does fail, and we do everything that we can to keep all of customers up and running," he said. "There's no indication right now that it would fail."
- Keith Barry contributed to this article
