As administrators continue to gather information about last weekend's campus-wide blackout, students have raised concerns about Tufts' effectiveness in responding to the 14-hour power outage, focusing particularly on the emergency alert service's timeliness and the inactivity of dormitories' electronic key fob systems.
Director of University Facilities Robert Bertram told the Daily that the exact cause of the blackout remains unknown. The university is concentrating on how to improve its preparation for such a failure, should it happen again.
"Obviously, everything is working now, but we still don't know what the cause of the blackout was and we may never know," Bertram said. "It was something that we couldn't see coming and can't avoid in the future."
Bertram said the university lost power at 1:57 p.m. on Sunday when a fuse blew on campus, burning conductors from a high-voltage line. Workers from National Grid, the company that provides Tufts' electricity, helped restore power at 4:05 a.m. on Monday, according to Bertram.
University officials are examining how effectively the Tufts Emergency Alert System reached students via their cell phones and e-mails.
The emergency-alert text messages and voice recordings went out at 7:15 p.m., over five hours after the power went out, because administrators did not want to contact the community until electricians from National Grid had assessed the situation.
"We wanted to know how serious the problem was and how long it was going to take to fix," Director of Public Safety John King said. "Our intent was not to withhold information, but to determine what was happening so that when we sent the message out, it would be of value to our students."
Tufts Community Union (TCU) President Duncan Pickard said that members of the TCU Senate raised concerns at their Monday meeting about the alert's timeliness.
"There were definitely concerns … about how the administration responded when the blackout happened, especially [regarding the] lack of communication for a while," said Pickard, a junior. "Even though the blackout isn't the type of emergency that Send Word Now is typically used for, at the time there was no other way for the university to get in contact with students because students weren't able to check their e-mail."
King said that administrators have taken concerns about the delay into account. "We've been able to take some lessons learned from the blackout, and will try to get notifications out sooner to more people," he said.
"If sending out a notice reduces anxiety, even if the notice isn't as informative as we want it to be, then it's an important change we'll have to make."
Implemented last year in response to the shootings at Virginia Tech, the system contacts members of the Tufts community via SMS text messages, phone calls and e-mails. A group of administrators decided to use it during the blackout, according to King.
"While an emergency alert system can be used during critical incidences as we saw with Virginia Tech, we felt that in this case there was a need to inform members of the community about what was going on and provide them with helpful information," he said.
In the case of similar blackouts in the future, the Tufts Emergency Alert System message will no longer be sent via text messages, due to the 140-character limit on Send Word Now dispatches, King added.
"The text-messaging alert was kind of cryptic and confusing to many people," he said. "We plan on using telephone messages for future power outages and preserving text message for situations that warrant small, short messages of value."
The message informed students that the campus' power had gone out and told them that Cousens Gym had power and was open to students. It also requested that they not use candles. The word "please" was abbreviated "pls."
Some students also expressed concern regarding the key fob system's inactivity during the blackout. Many students propped their dormitories' doors open in order to get in, allowing easier access to residence halls.
Although no criminal activity was reported during the blackout, propped doors constituted the most worrisome security issue the Tufts University Police Department (TUPD) faced during the blackout, Sgt. Robert McCarthy said
"All officers were given instructions to close propped doors, but students would just prop them open right after," McCarthy said.
The fob system's backup battery power, which usually lasts for 30 to 40 minutes, is not strong enough to support a 14-hour power outage, according to Technical Services Manager Geoffrey Bartlett.
Campus emissions regulations prevent the university from increasing the number of generators that would give power to residence halls and fob systems during future blackouts, according to King.
"I don't think that there is anything we can do in the short run to provide buildings with backup forms of power during a power outage," he said.
Sophomore Karen Andres said that leaving doors open on an unlit campus made her uncomfortable. "I don't know what a viable solution would be to the fob system going down during the blackout, but I definitely felt unsafe knowing that the doors were open to anyone," Andres said. "As time went on, I was afraid that people outside of Tufts would eventually get word of the blackout and would have easy access to the buildings and our rooms."
Unlike Andres, sophomore Margaret Gelly said that knowing the fob system was down did not concern her. "I feel safe on campus regardless of whatever the circumstances are, and I felt just as safe during the blackout as I normally do," she said.
To make up for the fob system's inactivity, King said that TUPD called in 15 extra police officers to provide security for students during the blackout. Throughout the night, officers handed out flashlights in residence halls, patrolled the campus and oversaw Dewick-MacPhie Dining Hall and Cousen's Gym, two buildings that had power and remained open to students.
"A lot of our officers came in on a Sunday and stayed all night," McCarthy said, adding that he thought "they did a very good job."
"I thought that TUPD did the best they could, considering that their job was to look after 3,000 residents without power," senior Alec Lewis said.
Although extra TUPD officers alleviated some security issues, Pickard felt it wasn't enough to monitor all buildings, as "there were more residence hall entrances than TUPD officers on campus, which made it difficult for all entrances to be monitored," he said.
Tufts had not seen a campus-wide blackout since July 2002. During that time, the Medford/Somerville campus experienced daily blackouts for a period of one week.
McCarthy said that the circumstances of that blackout were different. "While Sunday's blackout was caused by an electrical fault on campus, the blackouts in 2002 were the results of a problem with a power company in Medford," McCarthy said. "That summer the university rented generators that would kick in whenever another blackout occurred."
Some Tufts buildings are connected to their own generators, including Dewick, West Hall, Pearson Hall and Barnum Hall. While these buildings had power during Sunday's blackout, Bertram pointed out that some generators were temporarily shut off.
"The Barnum-Dana generator, which also connects [to] West Hall, went down at one point in the evening while it was being refueled, but it eventually came back again," Bertram said.
