Power back online; thank you for your patience

Dear RIT Community,

I want to express sincere thanks to the students, faculty, staff, and parents who dealt with the power outage on campus the past two days. The power is back online.

We’ve all been there at our places where we live. The power goes out, and you hope it’s just a flicker, and it will pop on again real soon. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case this time, as we soon learned.

RIT Facilities Management Services personnel and outside contractors worked tirelessly through two nights to find and fix the problem. First, we identified the cause as a faulty splice in a medium voltage distribution feeder cable. The next phase was to isolate the splice and restore power. Between those steps, we had to take buildings offline to work on the problem safely.

As each hour passed, I learned about the resiliency of our students. Some of them offered suggestions on the problem. Others helped their fellow students by opening up their rooms through the night. As for the RIT staff, many came in on their off-hours and worked to help. It was a Tiger team effort.

Note: Two elevators in the residence halls still remain down, but we have a vendor on campus to resolve this issue.

We believe this was an isolated incident, but for the time being, generators brought in to temporarily power the residence halls will remain available for reconnection if there are unexpected disruptions. Despite our annual preventive maintenance and testing of the electrical distribution system, we can never fully eliminate the potential for failures. We will continue to evaluate the electrical infrastructure and look for ways to improve our reliability and service.

Again, thank you for your understanding.

John Moore
Associate Vice President, Facilities Management Services