A power outage struck a significant portion of campus in the afternoon on July 13, cutting electricity in 19 buildings.
It wasn’t a major disaster, but students, faculty and staff felt the consequences of the six-hour affair. The library closed, classes ended early and unsaved work vanished.
It caused more than a few of us to wonder: With today’s technology (and enough of our tuition money), shouldn’t the University of Oregon be better at preventing outages — or, in the least, getting power back quicker? To sum my post-investigation answer: yes and no.
In some respects, power outages are inevitable. The one that occurred Wednesday was caused by a great and terrible — drumroll please — rat.
According toTony Hardenbrook, UO Director of Utilities and Energy, the rodent made contact with an exposed 12,500-volt circuit on Sunday. It died immediately but left a fault that overheated a spliced feeder cable a few days later when the campus was using more electricity. This cable was 35 years old — a senior citizen in electrical years — but it had been tested about a month before and deemed safe, Hardenbrook said.
When unplanned power outages happen, trained utilities staff respond with systematic, safety-first precautions. Certified electricians walk the five miles of electrical tunnels under campus “to inspect the electrical connections, to make sure there hasn’t been a fire and to ensure all the equipment is intact,” Hardenbrook said. “And then during the troubleshooting portion, we have to do it all over again.”
So there are some aspects of power outages, unfortunately, that no one can reasonably eradicate.
The good news is that these types of outages don’t happen often. According to Hardenbrook, the last unplanned, utility-level outage was in December of 2014; it was part of a city-wide failure of a grid powered by the Eugene Water and Electricity Board (EWEB). The Oregonian reported the failure was the result of “severe weather,” which cut electricity to over 40,000 homes across Oregon.
The even-better news is that the Utilities Department is implementing tools to predict failures early and take action before there’s an impact to campus.
The department recently hired an engineering firm to assist with a master utility plan, which includes predictive maintenance and testing, higher equipment standards and a plan to phase out old utilities such as the spliced cable that caused the recent outage, Hardenbrook said.
By the end of this year, the department also hopes to launch an Enterprise-wide Asset Management System, a software-based program that, among other things, will help calculate the operational lifespan of equipment and systems. Hardenbrook said the department also hired two new electricians and invested in better training.
Under the leadership of Vice President for Finance and Administration Jamie Moffitt, these changes are being made with the help of four other departments, and they’re being made in a financially-prudent (read: not tuition-raising) way.
By raising the efficiency of utility equipment, operating costs should go down, Hardenbrook said. He added that every dollar his team saves “lessens the pressures placed on tuition or the general fund.”
“It’ll take three to five years to really get traction and see definitive levels of failure reductions,” Hardenbrook said. “We’re not up to speed yet, but all the things are falling into place.”
In the end, campus power outages are a problem, but this is one of those rare cases where the solution is simple: Be patient. There’s a team of experts working on it.
 
 
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