A power outage that plunged over a dozen buildings on the east side of campus into darkness Saturday night was caused by a cable failure between Bryan Circle and Mauldin Hall.
The outage happened just before 11 p.m. Saturday as thousands of Clemson fans were leaving campus after the Tigers defeated the Duke Blue Devils in football.
The cable, located in an underground conduit, failed and caused a main breaker in the campus switch station to open for system protection. Multiple buildings, including Douthit Hills, Calhoun Courts, Thornhill Village and Lever, Byrnes, Mauldin, Barnett and Vickery halls were affected. Several traffic lights were darkened by the outage as well.
University electricians drove against the flow of game traffic to get to campus to fix the problem. After several hours, they were able to isolate the problem and restore power to most of the buildings. Mauldin Hall was without power until 5:40 p.m. Sunday because workers had to replace the section of cable that failed, according to Tony Putnam, campus Utility Services director.
“The major electrical project we commenced early this year and plan to complete over the next three years will greatly improve the university’s system reliability, automation, redundancy and fault detection capabilities and minimize the extent of this type of outage,” he said.
