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NEWS
| May 6, 2004
Arlington
Injury leads to power outage
Physical plant shuts down some
campus operations after worker is electrocuted by a live wire.
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| The Shorthorn: Sergios Rahmatoulin |
| Undeclared sophomore Neiza
Santos gives a presentation about Columbia during
the “Spanish for Heritage Speakers” class
outside the University Center on Wednesday morning. The
class had to move outside after an electrical outage.
“In spite of the problems we did it!” professor
Rosado Dorica said. |
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By Jessica
Freeman
Contributor to The Shorthorn
An accident at a South Cooper Street electrical
substation injured a utility worker and caused power outages throughout
much of campus Wednesday morning.
Battalion Chief John McQueary said emergency workers responded at
around 10 a.m. Wednesday to a call about a possible electrocution
at the 1900 block of South Cooper Street and found a subcontractor
hanging in a harness who had come in contact with a live electrical
wire. Oncor, a utility company, turned off power at the substation,
the main source for campus electricity, to allow the worker to be
safely rescued.
The man, an unidentified employee of Fort-Worth based Texas Eco
Services Incorporated, was reportedly conscious and breathing while
being flown by helicopter to Parkland Hospital. His condition is
unknown.
Jeff Johnson, director of the physical plant, said he contacted
Oncor after power was lost in several buildings on campus. Oncor
informed the Physical Plant of the situation, and the university
opted to shut down power to university cooling systems.
“It’s a standard procedure any time we have a power
outage to shut down the chillers and restart them after power is
restored,” Johnson said.
John Hall, interim vice president for administration and campus
operations, said he was notified by Johnson around 10:15 a.m. that
the power was down.
“We began to evacuate buildings as is customary when we lose
power,” Hall said.
Power was restored around 20 minutes later. Hall said officials
were still unsure if electricity was stable at an 11 a.m. meeting
with the president. This led officials to call for a halt of campus
operations until 1 p.m., which was soon retracted. Officials were
in the process of giving word of the closing when they were informed
that power was fully stable.
“Only a few minutes after the meeting concluded, Oncor said
they had done some rerouting the grid and that we could expect stable
power for the balance of the day,” Hall said. “We then
elected to resume normal operations immediately, but that might
not have been communicated as effectively to all parties as it could
have been.”
Hall said the closing retraction may have led to confusion.
“In hindsight, it might have been better to step back and
not react quite so quickly,” he said. “Because so many
customers were affected well outside UTA, we should have figured
they would stabilize things as quickly as possible. But when things
like this occur, you try to work as quickly and as effectively as
you can.”
Suzanne Montague, interim vice president for information and technology,
said she made the decision for campus computer systems to be shut
down after being informed of the outage.
“We have U.P.S. (uninterrupted power supply), enough power
on battery so that it allows us to gracefully shut things down and
it usually takes anywhere from 15-45 minutes for some things to
come down,” Montague said.
An announcement on the campus Web site said computer systems would
be restored between 12:30 and 1:30 p.m. However, Montague said some
systems, including faculty and staff e-mail, never came down at
all, and most systems were restored by noon.Still, the outage caused
problems for students working on campus computers.
English junior Lindsey Hibbard was working on her final project
for an English class in Ransom Hall when power went out, and lost
information for 49 pictures she had spent an hour and a half working
on.
“I had to open pictures in Photoshop and change them into
JPEG,” Hibbard said. “When the power went out, it was
lost.”
CORRECTION
In this story, John Hall’s title should have
been vice president for administration and campus operations.
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