Much of the St. Thomas campus and surrounding neighborhood lost power at around 1 p.m. Monday due to an issue at an Xcel Energy substation. Power was restored at around 1:45 p.m.
Brady Education Center and the Schoenecker Center maintained power.
St. Thomas Public Safety sent out a message at 1:24 p.m. detailing the issue to students, in which it noted a problem with the substation caused most of the St. Paul campus to be without power. Xcel Energy estimated a repair time of two hours.
A subsequent email was sent at 2:05 p.m. updating students of the power’s return.
During the outage, generators could be heard humming throughout the St. Paul campus.
First-year Tommie North resident Evie Zack was sitting in her room with her TV on when the power went out.
“I thought it was only my room, so I texted my friends, and then I saw in everyone’s (Snapchat) stories that their classrooms went out, too,” Zack said.
Power was also lost in Anderson Student Center, including The View, according to The View Production Chef Paul Date. While he has not experienced an outage of this magnitude before, he says that dining services staff took action to maintain service without electricity.
“Basically, as soon as the power goes out the first thing is to make sure that all the equipment is turned off, making sure that it’s good,” Date said. “We can’t produce any food because the hoods are off, so the only thing we can really do is keep the salad bar and the deli open, and everything else we just keep open until we run out of food.”
Date said that food spoiling was “not too much of a concern” due to The View’s time temperature control systems that allow staff to preserve food, especially for the relatively short duration of the outage.
Library research assistant Jos Morss was working at the main desk in O’Shaughnessy-Frey Library when the power went out.
“It went off and we were just like, ‘What happened?’” Morss said. “I thought someone turned off the lights, honestly.”
They said that students sitting in the library expressed confusion and began looking up Xcel Energy in order to determine when the power would come back on.
“Everyone came down here and was like, ‘Can I borrow a study room?’ and I was like, ‘Do you want to sit in the dark?’” Morss said.
Anya Capistrant-Kinney can be reached at capi2087@stthomas.edu.
Kevin Lynch can be reached at lync1832@stthomas.edu.