Quiet zone: Preus Library suffers power outage

Preus Library lost power Wednesday Sept. 23 at 7:40 a.m. due to a high voltage cable fault in a conduit that feeds to the library. The library was officially closed for the day, although some help desk staff continued to help students and staff still in great need of library resources.

“Generally our policy here is that when the power is out, we’ll close the building for safety and security,” LIS Director Chris Barth said. “There are parts of the building that get extremely dark. The bathrooms get very dark and computers are obviously not working. There’s not much point being in here.”

The outage also interfered with classes that were using the library.

“There were a bunch of Paideia classes taking tours of the library at that time, and since we were not sure when the power was going to come back on, we led them out,” Zach Peterson (‘10), a student worker, said.

Although the power loss was inconvenient for many students and faculty, the Help Desk provided a limited resource center. Students could still perform necessary tasks at the circulation desk or use books from the library, but other library resources were unavailable without electricity.

The college worked to find a solution to the outage.

“The fix was actually replacing the cable in the feeder that failed,” Jay Uthoff, manager of Trade Services, said. “We had a couple of options for that. The first was to check with our local utility to see if they had a cable we could use. We spent about a day working through all of the options with them. They had some cable, but it was [different enough] that we ended up not using it”.

The correct type of cable was eventually located near Chicago. Two facilites staff members left campus at 2:00 a.m. Friday morning to retrieve the wiring and returned with the cable later that day

“We were ready at that time to pull the cable into the conduit system from in front of the CFL to the library,” Uthoff said. “It took about 2 hours to get the cable pulled in. Once the cable was pulled in we had about 7 hours of splicing the cables and tying everything back to permanent power. That work was finished about 1:30 AM Saturday morning.”

Facilities was able to temporarily hook up the building to a big diesel generator in the Preus parking lot, and from about 7:30 Wednesday night until Saturday morning the library was functioning with power. The generator worked to power everything in the library except the air conditioning.

“Everything was working pretty much in order the next day,” Peterson said. The helpdesk people had been at work the whole time on Wednesday using flashlights.

“We don’t have a total cost for the repairs yet. I expect that it will be in the range of $6,000.00 to $7,000.00,” Uthoff wrote.

Besides the loss of power inside the library, the outage interfered with internet connections in some of the dorms. This was due to the fact that most of Luther’s internet connection comes in through the library, and while they do have battery backups that were used then, the small interruptions were because the technicians were working to get the long-term generator started so that the internet would continue working properly.