Power has been restored to all buildings except for the Ray E. Cramer Marching Hundred Hall, which is still operating on emergency power, IU spokesman Chuck Carney said.
Power outages occurred at multiple IU student buildings across campus throughout Tuesday afternoon. The first IU Notify alert went out around 3:45 p.m., and the final alert did not go out until about 5 p.m.
According to the IU Police Department's Twitter page, the outages were caused by an electrical box explosion at a chilled water plant near 13th Street and Walnut Grove.
Kathryn Brinser, a student supervisor for the Restaurants at Woodland at Forest Quad said when the power went out, the vents of a hamburger grille stopped working, causing it to smoke, but it only lasted for a few minutes.
Brinser said the outage meant that food cooking, in warmers or refrigerators when the power went out may need to be thrown away.
“It sucks for people that have to work tonight just because there is so much work to be done before we can serve people again,” Brinser said. “And we have to turn away a bunch of people.”
Of the housing units, Wright Quad, Teter Quad, Briscoe Quad, University East Apartments, Forest Quad, Read Center and Ashton Center were out of power, Carney said. In addition, Marching Hundred Hall lost power.
At the peak of the outages, 18 buildings were without power, Carney said.
It was a Duke Energy problem, he added.
No classroom buildings were affected by the outages, Carney said. The Bloomington Fire Department and Duke Energy were on site during the outages.
Freshman Nathan Kaczmarek was in the bathroom when the power went out. He said he didn’t think much of the outage, he heard it happens all the time.
Kaczmarek said he had a friend visiting from IUPUI and was hoping to get some of his homework done before his friend arrived, but the WiFi was out.
“It was online stuff, so that didn’t get done,” Kaczmarek said. “I’m going to do that later which is a big bummer.”
When the power came back on, Kaczmarek said he was happy to have air conditioning back.
Alex Hardgrave and Peter Talbot contributed reporting to this story.
