Campus experiences power outage
Blackouts, power surges and downed power lines plagued LSU’s campus Sunday.
Executive Director of Computing Services Ron Hay said the local power company Entergy told him ducks flew into power lines, causing the power outage on campus.
Workers in Computing Services operate 24 hours a day and were there to deal with the outage. The workers called Computing Services management to deal with the problem.
Charles McMahon, Assistant Director of Telecommunications in Computing Services, said when Entergy fixed the power outage, there was a high voltage surge that went to the uninterruptable power supply, which Computing Services uses to regulate incoming energy. The UPS prevented the power surge from coming into the sensitive equipment, McMahon said.
However, the power surge blew fuses in the UPS.
The networking equipment was saved because of the UPS. When power goes off on campus, backup generators kick in to supply power to Computing Services.
McMahon said Computing Services planned how to handle a loss of power, but not necessarily a situation like this.
Hay said the network has not been down in years. Also, he said the power has been out before but the backup services never have been disabled.
“We’ve never experienced anything quite like that,” Hay said.
Once the UPS was down, the department had to work around it. McMahon said the employees cannot work around the UPS long because it will cause fluctuations in the energy, which can cause energy spikes.
Then, Entergy restored power and the department took power off the generators. Computing Services manually took the servers down, but when the energy was restored, McMahon said it took a while to reboot every machine and get them back online.
Hay said there were minimal complaints because it did occur on a Sunday. Mostly people were affected if they were trying to access the mainframe applications.
“We were fortunate it happened on a weekend,” McMahon said.
Reggie, PAWS, e-mail and the online library catalog were down Sunday, but were restored later that day.
In the library, the online catalog was down Sunday until 2 or 3 p.m. While the online catalog was down, the library used Worldcat, a data system that gave librarians and students rough but not exact call numbers of books. Using this system did not tell students if books were checked out or in the library, so students had to search the shelves for the books.
Since the library opened at noon, the catalog was only down for about one and a half to two hours said Jason Martin, patents and business librarian, who was working the Reference Desk Sunday.
Students also were affected by the outages. Although Blackboard was working, students could not get e-mail through PAWS. When students and teachers e-mail through Blackboard, the e-mails go through PAWS.
Clint Artieta, a marketing senior, said he could not check his e-mail Sunday and could not meet with classmates to work on a project. If the problem had lasted more than one day, Mike Krumholt, a finance senior, said he would have been more affected because he communicates with his classmates and teachers through e-mail.
Monday, a technician was flown in to repair the UPS. By 8:45 a.m., it was working again.
As of press time, Hay reported some applications still were not functional. Some dial-up services and some Unix services, a service used by academic researchers, were among those not working.
Both Hay and McMahon said they were afraid it would have taken several days for the system to become operational.
Also, McMahon was concerned the older equipment would be damaged as a result of the power surge. He said they were able to repair and recover most of the equipment. Only three or four pieces were completely destroyed, but other damage was small enough to be repaired.
“I consider us very fortunate that the damage is not greater than it actually turned out to be,” McMahon said.
Hay and McMahon agreed it was amazing everything was up and running within 24 hours of going down. McMahon said he did not think they could have fixed the problem any faster.
“We were not only lucky, we were lucky and we were good,” McMahon said.
Jessica Waldon