Intentional blackouts hit 13 university buildings for as much as an hour at a time during winter break.
From Dec. 23 to Jan. 1, outages occurred almost daily. The west campus electrical infrastructure is poorly documented, leaving it vulnerable to failure, and the outages were part of an assessment to fix this problem.
Intentional blackouts hit 13 university buildings for as much as an hour at a time during winter break.
From Dec. 23 to Jan. 1, outages occurred almost daily. The west campus electrical infrastructure is poorly documented, leaving it vulnerable to failure, and the outages were part of an assessment to fix this problem.
While the $200,000 maintenance project wasn’t reported to have any cost savings to the university, it was a necessary maintenance exercise, said Quinn Soifer, facilities engineer.
Outages did not affect residential buildings, and only affected buildings used primarily for research, classes and office space. Many of the PSU science labs are located in the affected areas, however.
Soifer explained that, in meetings with the departments, PSU Facilities and Property Management reached an agreement that one hour was the maximum amount of time a lab could be without power without damaging research. Generators were on site in case of failure during the maintenance.
Chemistry professor Niles Lehman manages one of the affected labs, where origin-of-life and prebiotic chemistry research is performed. He explained that nothing was harmed during the power cuts. Except for having to briefly shut down computers, research was unaffected, and he and his students were able to work during the break.
But what, specifically, did FPM do during the shutoffs? Soifer explained that the electrical infrastructure was long overdue for maintenance because of all the small repairs and adjustments that had occurred over the last 20 years.
“We were able to install sensors on the cabling and test the integrity of cabling periodically as needed so we can better plan for the future,”
Soifer said.
Scott Gallagher, PSU’s director of communications, said improving the documentation was a part of PSU’s deferred maintenance list—the schedule of noncritical projects the university works on when it has available funds.
“It’s not anything that’s been ignored,” Gallagher said. “It’s just on the list. You know, it’s like your house.”
Departments, lease holders and lab managers were notified and encouraged to make the appropriate adjustments and remove perishables. The maximum duration of any outage was one hour, with additional power bumps and outages of 15 to 30 seconds.
My, how the terms of the debate has changed on gun control (many are even squeamish about calling it that) since I was a student at PSU in 1968, when Robert Kennedy was assasinated by a handgun.
There was a time, long ago it seems, that we talked about getting rid of guns that were called “Saturday Night Specials”, meaning the pistols folks carried around in their pockets. How quaint that discussion seems today after the Supreme Court ruled that the 2nd Amendment means anyone can have any kind of firearm they want. Gun control laws today means only that we “restrict” the ability to buy military grade weapons more appropriate for going out on patrol in Afghanistan, and having the ammunition in it to fire 100 high powered rounds without having to reload.
Yes, it is a much different, and scarrier, world today!