UPDATE: Shorted power line to blame for Park Library outage, officials say

University officials are blaming a shorted power line as the cause of Sunday’s outage in the Charles V. Park Library.

Steve Lawrence, associate vice president of Facilities Management, said the line that runs between the Music Building and the library shorted, causing the power to flicker and then shut off at about 9:15 p.m.

“It took a while to figure out what happened,” he said.

Lawrence said power was off at Anspach, Brooks and Foust Halls, as well as the Health Professions Building and the library. The generators in the other buildings functioned properly to power up their generators, but not the library’s, he said.

The generators’ automatic function did not work, Lawrence said, so they had to be turned on manually.

“The generators should have been running,” he said. “When FM got there, they had to start the generators.”

Full power was restored to the library at about 4:50 a.m. today, Lawrence said.

Lawrence said FM will call in a maintenance worker to inspect the generator this week.

Gerry Edgar, the library’s building coordinator and business manager, said the building opened this morning with little problem. He said the library’s security camera digital video recorder system is not working, but that is not an urgent problem.

“That’s only important at night,” he said.

Check cm-life.com for more updates, and Wednesday’s print edition for a full story.