Construction Mishap Knocks Out Mason's Lights, A.C.

POWER OUTAGE
Powerless! How Do I Live?
Jittered by Monday's outage? It won't be the last Mason's campus ever faces, and it won't be for the greater community either. Thousands in the D.C. area loss power Sunday after a recent storm. 
What's the first thing you do when the lights go off unexpectedly? Do you grab a book, or do you rely on battery power?

Join in.         

 UPDATED 5:05 p.m. 

Construction workers nicked a reportedly mislabeled power supply during work on a housing project on the northwest side of George Mason University’s Fairfax campus, rendering more than half of the school’s buildings without power for the majority of the Monday workday.

The outage occurred at approximately 10:30 a.m. when members of the construction crew working on the new dormitory project Housing VIIIA hit a “bulk feeder,” a main line source of power for the university, according to Nancy Pickens, a project manager for Facilities Planning. No one was hurt during the incident.

“All I know is I went to plug in my laptop, and when I looked back up, the power was out,” said Rona Loscano, a Sodexo unit manager with Mason Dining, while convening with other managers in a dimly lit Johnson Center shortly before the lunchtime rush hours. With a majority of its summer operations affected by the outage, Mason Dining temporarily opened Southside to the public during the outage, as well as its hot dog cart on the North Plaza. Employees also continued to sell “Grab N’ Go” items for cash-only in the Johnson Center, until the power returned at approximately 2:45 p.m.

Shortly thereafter, dining operations — and the majority of offices on campus who persevered through the lack of electricity and air-conditioning — returned to their normal summer schedule.

Pickens says that the location of the struck bulk feeder that caused the outage was marked incorrectly by a crew dispatched from the state-administered “Miss Utility” center, a clearinghouse of information that locates underground utilities before construction. At time of publication, Miss Utility was not available for comment on the issue.

“[Mislabeling] is common,” said Pickens. A similar incident occurred, she said, during work on Housing VIIC, the construction project for the Eastern Shore and Hampton Roads dormitories.

Buildings affected by the outage included: the Johnson Center, Enterprise Hall, Innovation Hall, Student Union Building I, Robinson Hall A and B, Research I, Science and Tech II, Student Apartments, Thompson Hall, the Fine Arts Building, College Hall and Mason Hall. Drawing their energy from a separate source, buildings on the eastern side of campus — including Northern Neck, Southside, Finley Hall, Krug Hall and Fenwick Library — remained powered, air-conditioned and otherwise unaffected by the incident.

“Guess we were lucky,” said Maya Alspach, a student and library employee.