Parts of Hyde Park lost electricity for approximately three hours last Monday, January 11, impacting some University buildings and student apartments.
The outage did not affect all parts of campus, but many apartments near 54th Street and Woodlawn Avenue lost power, as well as the University’s Ida Noyes Hall on 59th Street.
The power went off a little before 11 p.m. and did not return until early the next morning, around 1 a.m.
Third-year Danna Elmasry and her roommates were worried the outage might affect their heating, especially given the week’s low temperatures. Monday night saw a high of 26 degrees and low of two degrees Fahrenheit.
“Some people have steam radiators, which you would find on a boiler. And if the pipes freeze, you have a problem. But this wasn’t a frozen pipe, it was the electricity,” Elmasry said.
Some RSOs that use Ida Noyes to practice or run their organizations were affected by the outage.
“We were just going through counts, we were in our positions when our lights just went out, and in the basement, there wasn’t any backup light, so it just went completely black,” second-year Emily Rodriguez said. Rodriguez dances with the North Indian dance crew Raas.
Shortly after the power initially shut off, the backup generator at Ida Noyes was able to restore electricity to certain areas of the building.
“Within a few minutes we had resumed practice, assuming that the backup generator was on and it would be fine. And then some…people who worked at Ida came into the room, saying, ‘Hey the lights went out for a minute. We’re asking that…everyone in the building leave Ida,’” Rodriguez said.