Campus sees multiple power outages

The most recent outage lasted about two hours.

By Lakeisha Williams

Published Nov. 18, 2008

Suddenly, one student's biggest fear became a reality.

"I was nearing the conclusive sentence of my 1,500-word paper when my entire room went black," freshman Erica Terry said. "The power was out for about two hours, and when it was restored only half of my paper had been recovered. So I spent about another two hours working to complete my five-page paper that was due the next morning."

There have been three power outages this semester, along with technical issues that delayed the Missouri Students Association presidential elections by a week. Despite the frequency of Internet problems, Division of Information Technology Director Terry Robb said the occurrences are all unrelated.

One power outage occurred Wednesday evening, mostly affecting the southwest side of campus.

"The power outage was pretty scary because some of my friends were stuck on the elevator the entire time," Laws Hall resident Lauren Mitchell said. "They were fine afterwards, but two hours is still a long time to be confined in such a small area."

While Laws lost power, other halls on the opposite end of campus were unaffected.

"My lights blinked out while I was working on an online assignment, but instantly came back on, so there wasn't really any harm done," Gillett Hall resident Joseph Andress said.

This outage is only one of few technical issues MU has experienced this semester. In addition to these outages, the Missouri Students Association elections scheduled for last Monday were postponed due to issues with MU's server, and this Sunday evening there was no access to the Internet at all. Many students have expressed concern in relation to these outages.

"I was a little alarmed when I went to vote for the MSA election online and there was no election to be found," Terry said. "I was afraid that I had missed it."

Division of Information Technology Director Terry Robb explained the various Internet problems.

"The power outage that occurred last Wednesday resulted because the data switches went out. Because we don't have back-up generators, the switches had to be manually reset, which took a few hours," Robb said.

He also said the MSA election technical difficulties were attributed to issues with the server.

"The issue with the MSA elections arose because of server problems, not issues with the network. The most important problem is the network failure that occurred Sunday," Robb said. "However, the equipment has been fixed and there will be follow-up maintenance done this upcoming Sunday."