UMD Facilities Management says Thursday’s power outage was caused by a circuit failure

Thursday night’s power outage on parts of the University of Maryland’s campus occurred after a large distribution circuit on the campus failed to work properly, Facilities Management Operations and Maintenance Director Jack Baker said.

A number of buildings — including the South Campus Dining Hall, the Architecture Building, Carroll, Caroline and Wicomico halls — were affected by the power outage.

One of the feeder circuits had a fault at about 6 p.m., Baker said. The specific cause of the failure has not yet been determined, he added.

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“It basically failed, and when it fails, it knocks down what we call the feeders,” Baker said. “And in this case it knocked down Feeder Two, which has on it such buildings at Architecture, Van Munching, South Campus Dining, LeFrak and some of the buildings on the south part of the campus.”

The whole campus experienced a lapse in the lighting when the power failure actually occurred, Baker said, which is why there were elevator failures and other issues affecting the entire campus.

Facilities Management checked the electrical boxes across this university to see if there was anything wrong with them, Baker said. After that, they worked to bring the power back up.

“We had a number of people who basically spent the night trying to turn the campus back on,” Baker said. “Bringing everything back on a large research campus is a pretty major effort.”

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Workers were most concerned about getting the lights and electricity back on in the dormitories — Carroll, Caroline and Wicomico halls — and managed to do that the night of the power failure, Baker said.

On Friday, Facilities Management finished bringing the air conditioning back onto Knight Hall, the Benjamin Building, Tawes Hall and the Art-Sociology Building, Baker said.

“Resident Life was concerned about the students, as we all are,” Baker said. “And we needed to get the power on as soon as we could … isolate the problem and bring buildings back on.”