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February 10, 2006 > News > Campus power outage causes little disruption

Campus power outage causes little disruption

By Risa Gordon and Amber Obermeyer | Thresher Editorial Staff

All of campus lost power for about two hours Wednesday morning when three transformers shut down off campus. The power loss disrupted Internet and e-mail service for several hours after power was restored.

At 2:17 a.m., an insulator failed at Centerpoint Energy’s Garrett substation, Assistant Vice President for Project Management and Engineering Doug Tomlinson said. The failure shorted out two of the substation’s four transformers, and another transformer shut down for safety reasons, Tomlinson said. Centerpoint restored power at about 4:15 a.m., Tomlinson said.

Information Technology

After power outages during an August thunderstorm and during Hurricane Rita in September, IT’s old Uninterruptable Power Supply units were replaced. UPS units allow IT systems to function during brief power surges — which Vice Provost for Information Technology Kamran Khan said have occurred six to eight times since the units were installed at the beginning of the fall semester.

The UPS units can provide power for about 15-20 minutes, Khan said.

“It allows us to shut off some systems, so when the power does come back, the services or servers come up very cleanly,” Khan said.

Most IT systems were restored between 5:30 and 7:30 a.m. Wednesday, Khan said.

“This is a much improved time for restoration of our core services,” Khan said. “By 8:00, most services, including e-mail and Web, were available to the campus.”

However, Khan said he hopes IT will become more efficient at shutting off systems.

“We weren’t able to shut all of them down, and we can do a better of job of logging in remotely and doing more of them,” Khan said.

Khan said essential systems — such as the network, e-mail, Web services and administrative systems — are shut down and restarted first.

“Those are the key things that everybody needs,” Khan said. “When people wake up, the first thing they want to do is get to their e-mail.”

Khan said IT staff members were on-site when power went out.

“We have operations people who were here — they were working frantically to communicate with everybody,” Khan said. “That’s just the nature of their position when they’re here when something like this happens.”

Facilities

Tomlinson said the campus emergency generators came on as expected, and the outage did not cause any long-term damage. However, boilers were without power, so there was no steam pressure — and therefore no hot water or heat — on campus. Tomlinson said starting a back-up generator large enough to run the boilers is complicated. He said Centerpoint Energy employees continually told Facilities, Engineering and Planning workers that power would be restored shortly, so FE&P did not start the generator.

“Had we known it was going to be two hours [without power], we might have made the decisions differently,” Tomlinson said. “But when [Centerpoint] kept telling us, ‘It’s going to be fixed, just give us a few more mintues,’ it was not worth it to go through all that effort.”

Tomlinson said steam pressure was fully restored by about 6:45 a.m.

Tomlinson said no students reported being stuck in elevators during the outage.

In the event of a thunderstorm, Tomlinson said more staff members would stay on campus to prepare for and deal with any outages. However, he said FE&P always monitors power systems thoughout campus.

“Rest assured, we have people here 24 hours a day, so we didn’t have to wait for somebody to show up at 7:00 [the next] morning going, ‘Hey, the power’s out — I wonder what happened,’” Tomlinson said.

Future

The phone system runs on a backup generator during a power outage, and Khan said he is in the process of securing funding for a similar generator for the network and e-mail systems.

“We hope to get a generator the same size as the one for our phone system,” Khan said. “Then we can keep critical systems up, so they will never go down during an outage.”

Rice has also been leasing a backup data center downtown since the fall semester, and Khan said the site would be used during an extended power outage.

“We would need that [in the case of] a major event that would disrupt services for a long period of time — say a day or more,” Khan said. “The other site would have the replicated data, and people could connect to it and continue to do business.”

Tomlinson said Rice can currently receive power from two circuits: a primary circuit that only serves Rice and a secondary circuit that serves the surrounding neighborhood but that Rice can use if its other circuit fails. Both circuits orginate from the Garrett substation. Because of the number of transformers that failed at the substation, both circuits were without power Wednesday.

Tomlinson said FE&P may consider using power from a different substation as enrollment increases and more buildings are added to campus.

“This isn’t going to happen overnight, or even in the next year probably, but as we grow, … instead of just keeping the tie-in to this existing substation, we’re going to try to bring power in from another substation,” Tomlinson said. “Ultimately, we would tie our systems together on campus, so that if this ever happened again, we would just isolate that system and take power off a different substation.”

End of article

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