Partial Power Outage Disrupts Campus Email, Activities

A power outage that lasted nearly six hours on Monday left parts of the Menlo College campus in the dark and disrupted the school's email and other Internet-based services.

The outage started shortly before 11 a.m. with the library losing power. The library is where some of the schools computer servers are housed. Because of the outage, Internet programs  such as MyMenlo, Jenzabar, and Internet-based campus services such as the cafeteria's meal plan system were unavailable.

The power outage left  parts of the Florence Moore Building in the dark. Students also reported difficulty accessing the Internet from their dorm rooms. 

The electricity was working in Brawner Hall, but students and faculty reported having difficulty connecting to the Internet.

In the library, librarians were sitting in the darkness, chatting with each other and trying to read. The rooms were completely empty. Some of the librarians talked about going home. Since the library is completely electronic, they couldn't work.

Across the campus Monday morning,  students were frantically looking for working printers so they print out their assignments.

Students who had work to submit via email, such as senior Kaila Lunn, were left wondering if they would be able to meet their deadlines. 

“All the work I had done I had to submit through the school’s email,” said Lunn.  “And even though I was able to find access to the Internet, the Menlo email system was still not working.”

Throughout the day, people asked one another if they able to get online. Tension was noticeable when Menlo community members realized there was no Internet connection.

Power was restored shortly before 5 p.m. In an email, Menlo's Chief Information Officer, Raechelle Clemmons wrote that IT services were also being brought back  online.

"We will use this outage as an opportunity to look at creating less multi-building interconnectivity and more redundancy, where possible, so we won't have situations where services continue to run but are inaccessible because of an outage elsewhere on campus," Clemmons added.

Anthony Foster and Bill Bennett contributed to this story.