Several buildings on and off campus without power

Deceptively deep puddles on sidewalks and a roaring Jordan River might not be the only side effects of the overnight rains.

Assistant Vice President for Facility Operations Hank Hewetson said several buildings have experienced technical problems.

These include the Psychology Building, the School of Optometry, Simon Hall, Sycamore Hall, Swain Hall, the Radio-TV Building, the Health Center, the Indiana Memorial Union, the Mellencamp building, Myers Hall and Teter and Forest Quadrangles.

Hewetson said Duke Energy started seeing these buildings going offline as of 12:57 p.m.  They lost one of their three circuits, and that circuit is still being serviced.

He said his men tapped into the backup circuit available on campus, and this has likely provided energy to the buildings that lost power.

“We’ve got people scrambling,” Hewetson said.

He said the weather could be to blame for the outages and technological troubles.

“We feed our campus from two different directions,” he said.

Power troubles are most prevalent south of the psychology building, he said.

Currently, there is no definite number of buildings without power, though Hewetson said Simon Hall is still not responsive on Duke Energy’s system.  

“We think everything is back up,” he said. “More than one circuit feeds to campus.”

The company is currently working to fix the problem as quickly and efficiently as possible, Hewetson said.  

“When these things happen, we have a lot going on,” he said.   

Amanda Marino