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By Abbie Stevens, StevensA6@Findlay.edu
A few weeks ago, the University of Findlay was affected by a power outage caused by an incident between a squirrel and a transformer.
On Thursday, Oct. 24, the Office of Student Affairs sent out a UF Update email to inform students and staff of the incident. The power outage was first noticed on campus around 9 a.m. that day and power was restored by 10:12 a.m. \
“From the time the power went out until AEP arrived on campus and the power was restored was less than one and a half hour,” Vice President of Student Affairs and Athletics Brandi Laurita said.
The primary buildings affected were Old Main and the Mazza Museum, with other buildings suffering outages to partial parts of the buildings. Due to this, a few classes in Old Main were dismissed early. Laurita reports that there are no lasting effects of the outage.
However, this is not the first power outage on campus in the past few years. In March of 2022, another squirrel-transformer interaction caused a power outage on campus and also resulted in the AMU filling with smoke, as the blown transformer resulted in blown motors in the AMU boiler room. In April 2022, a long-term outage due to an AEP substation issue caused all of UF’s main campus to be without power overnight.
“I would not say outages are common, but the squirrel/outage scenario has repeated itself a handful of times over the past five or six years,” Assistant Vice President of Facilities Services Ben Taylor said.
A few buildings on campus have generators, but there are not enough generators on campus to ensure full operations if a campus-wide outage occurs.
“We have 10 buildings on campus with backup generators,” Taylor said. “None of the generators provide full power to its location, more of a safety aspect with lighting for buildings.”
