Knowledge is power, and on Friday, Indiana University was without the latter.

An extended power outage affected 55 buildings on the IU campus over a span of 10 hours, limiting students and faculty accessibility to non-electrical devices.

Some buildings were without lights, electricity and access to elevators throughout the day, resulting in many classes being cancelled.

“What we do know for sure is that we had a cable failure within a transformer that’s located by the Indiana Memorial Union, {IMU}’’ IU spokesperson Chuck Carney said. “How that started –whether it started externally from there –we don’t know at this time.”

According to an article written by the “Indiana Daily Student”, IU officials confirmed in a twitter post that power outages had been reported around campus at 9:32 a.m.

At 10:43 a.m., Carney said that the outage was due to a failure at a Duke Energy Substation just outside the IU campus.

It wasn’t until 9:05 p.m. that power was completely restored to all buildings on campus, much later than the first reported time of 6:30 p.m.

“This is an unusual circumstance and we were glad to work with Duke Energy to make sure that we did get the power back on,” Carney said. “It took quite a bit of time, but in that amount of time, we were able to mitigate any losses that we might’ve had.”

According to a “Hoosier Times” article, seven residence centers, (Wright, Teter, Briscoe, Forest, Read, and Ashton Halls,) along with the University East Apartments ,were affected by the outage.

 

However, throughout the entire outage, faculty  struggled to find options to secondary power.

“The {Media School} studio has about an hours’ worth of backup, and that’s long gone,” said digital production specialist Allen Major. “All of our {Media School} Friday labs were cancelled earlier today.”

In Major’s time at IU, he also agrees that the outage was peculiar.

“Not one {outage} that’s lasted this long,” Allen said. “Most of the ones that’ve happened have happened either late in the day when we just went home, and it kind of got resolved really quick, or it’s like an hour or so. This is the longest one I’ve been involved in.”

For some students, it took some time to realize that the power outage was occurring.

“I didn’t even know it was going on,” said IU sophomore Emily Garver. “I had noticed a lot of cop cars around… I walked into Franklin Hall and was like, ‘Whoa what’s going on?”

“I was eating breakfast somewhere but it was like only a couple of the lights were off and I didn’t really know what was happening, I just sort of went on,” said IU sophomore Raymond Labban, “then I came over to Franklin to see that the power was out, which was a bummer because I need to work on stuff, I just sort of figured that it would be up in a little bit.”

Including IU, four outages occurred on Friday in Monroe County according to Duke Energy.