A power outage struck the Ellicott Complex, Greiner Hall and Governors Complex for approximately 45 minutes at around 6:30 p.m. on Thursday. The outage caused the affected residents to be curious about its source.
“I was literally just laying in my bed,” Aubrey Huber, a freshman history major, said. “And then the lights went out.”
“I was out, traversing the halls,” Keagan Didier, a freshman psychology major, said. “People were making jokes at the time, and we brought out flashlights, the ones on our phones.”
While some UB’s residents were making the best of a bad situation, UB electricians identified the cause: a broken insulator resulted in a small explosion within the electrical systems.
“We think it might have been winter salt, or some contamination,” UB Electric Shop Supervisor Mitchell Kish said. “The insulator grounded… 34,000 volts of electricity went into a piece of steel.”
The insulator is currently being fixed. According to Kish, the repair should not affect the residents.
A team of UB electricians rerouted the power to a second feeder cable, which allowed the lights to turn back on and for machinery to work as intended.
“We’ll reattach the insulator soon, and let it run for a few days to make sure everything’s working,” Kitch said. “We’ll put the energy back into that feeder cable in late february, so expect a short loss of energy at around 5-6 a.m.”
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