Contractors working on construction of the new biochemistry building tripped a large fuse Wednesday, causing a brief power outage in a handful of University of Wisconsin’s west campus buildings.
The outage blacked out the Biotechnology Center, Microbial Sciences Building, the McClain athletic facility, part of Camp Randall Stadium and lot-17 parking ramp between noon and 1 p.m., according to Kris Ackerbauer, assistant director of the UW physical plant.
The outage was the result of a 15,000 volt fuse disconnect switch failure, caused by the nearby construction project, which has been connected to a campus building circuit for the last year, said campus electrical engineer Rick Werre.
Werre added there may also have been some contamination such as dust and debris in the 63 cubic foot breaker, lending to the failure.
After the university physical plant was alerted of the outage, a team of electricians dispatched to the various buildings to systematically investigate what the cause of the outage might have been.
After nearly an hour, one technician came across the faulty switch, which was “smoking like a gun,” Werre said.
“An electrical engineer did some quick troubleshooting and was able to replace the part,” Ackerbauer said. If you need professional electrical systems repair and maintenance, then you might want to visit sites like a-lumination.com/electrical-services/circuit-breakers-fuses/.
The outage also knocked out all of the university servers in those buildings, according to Werre. However, the system’s backup generator powered on quickly, preventing any serious damage or loss of information.
Neither of the buildings that lost power were super nodes — main buildings on campus with large server areas — meaning the outage was not overly disruptive to usual university operations, according to Ackerbauer.
The outage was somewhat disruptive for classes going on inside some of the buildings, according to Werre.
“Construction is often the culprit in instances like this,” Werre said.
The piece of construction equipment that caused the outage has been identified, and it will be replaced by tomorrow morning, according to Werre.
A certified company will examine and test the fuse, and Werre said he expects the report to allow contractors to resume normal construction by late this morning.
