Power Goes Out in Lowell

Lowell students were left in the dark when power failed in parts of the building shortly after midnight last night.

According to a number of students, power failed first in a number of entries at around midnight and went out everywhere in Lowell House about 20 minutes later.

Engineering and Utilities workers from Harvard's University Operations Services arrived shortly after 1 a.m. to assess the situation.

At shortly after 2 a.m., workers were still busy disassembling Lowell's aging electric systems to pinpoint the cause of the problem. They said they had not yet been able to determine the cause of the outage. They verified that the outage was isolated to Lowell House.

Keycard access failed in some entryways, but remained active in most.

Hallway lights provided emergency lighting in all the entryways. Those systems are connected to a separate emergency electrical system. Dorm rooms, tunnels and Lowell's two courtyards, however, were eerily black.

Students said they were amused rather than miffed at the event.

"It's actually really nice," said Lowell House resident Whitney Ice '02. "I have an excuse to go to bed without finishing the rest of my work."

Ice was doing her laundry when the power began to fail.

"The lights and one of the washers went out, but the others stayed on," she said. "Then a while later they all went off."

--Staff writer C. Matthew MacInnis can be reached at macinnis@fas.harvard.edu.