siuDE.com

A day of unusual warm weather was upstaged by an unwanted pain in the neck for most SIUC students on Monday.

Officials with SIUC's Physical Plant are attempting to find what caused a power outage that affected 25 campus buildings and left users of the university's Internet service in a scramble to rearrange their study schedules.

Tammy Winter, head of library circulation, said all the lights and computer screens on the first floor of Morris Library went dark at 3:15 p.m. Within minutes, the library was clear of students who were disappointed by the library's inability to provide services without power. Winter said library administrators in the Northwest Annex, which still had power from a separate system, would decide whether to close the facility altogether.

Cheryl Sickinger, a junior studying advertising, said she normally comes to Morris Library to get away from distractions and to use faster Internet source than the dial-up connection she has at her Tri-Sigma sorority house on Greek Row.

Sickinger said she was hoping to work on an Internet-based project for one of her journalism courses in the library, but said there were other places she could work that still had power, such as the Communications Building.

David Carlson, dean of Library Affairs, was on scene to supervise attempts to start the library's new diesel powered generator, which was supposed to provide electricity to the building's elevators and upper floors in order to provide lighting for construction workers involved with the library's renovation. Carlson said there would be no delays in the renovation because of the power outage since construction workers normally leave the building at the time lights went out.

Carlson said he considered closing the library because of the lack of lighting. The only sources of light inside the building during Monday's outage were from battery powered emergency lights.

"It's a really unsafe place to be, especially with the construction," Carlson said.

Next door to the library, microbiology graduate students in a power-absent Lindegren Hall, such as Ming Gao and Stacey Taft of Carbondale, were transferring bacterial cultures and chemical solutions to freezers that still had power. Gao said the samples being moved need to be stored in a cold environment to prevent spoilage. Lindegren has two freezers on a separate power source for just such an emergency.

None of the samples kept in the freezers are hazardous if they were to spoil, Gao said.

The power outage also spread to the Engineering and Applied Sciences and Arts buildings, where students were forced to quit their work nearly two hours early. Brooke Hagene, a dental hygiene sophomore from Pickneyville, said she was worried about how the unexpected delay would impact her work schedule.

"I'll probably have to finish later in the semester," Hagene said.

The campus' Internet service and university Web site were also victims of the power outage. Though Internet service had returned in some buildings around 6:30 p.m., the SIUC Web site was still giving visitors an error message.

Joe Crawford and Christian Holt contributed to this report.

Daily Egyptian writer Barton Lorimor can be reached at 536-3311 ext. 274 or barton.lorimor@siude.com.

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