After an hour and a half power at MSU was restored Thursday after an electrical line sparked at the Simon Power Plant.
"We had a fault on a cable out in the campus area and unfortunately the magnitude of the fault knocked the whole plant just about off," said director of utilities, Robert Ellerhort.
The outage also affected traffic flow on campus as several stoplights were turned into four way stops. In all, 40 buildings and the power plant on MSU's north side of campus were without power.
Ellerhorts says the buildings affected with directly connected to the plant, "not everybody was impacted that's the bottom line. Only customers that were actually on the circuit where the failure occurred were the ones that got knocked off and I would say it's about half the load for campus."
Most of the buildings on campus have emergency light safety generators that went on as soon as the campus lost power but several buildings did not. Including Floyd W. Owen Graduate Hall on Shaw Lane.
Students tell News 10 they think the University's response was fast but they wish they had more information.
"They didn't tell anybody, they don't say what's closed," said Evan Carter Taylor. "They just said there might be power outage affecting campus but what does that mean? This is a big campus."
Fortunately, the power outage didn't cause too much trouble and the outage was short.
"Everything is back to normal no equipment was permanently damaged in the plant," Ellerhorts said. "Everybody was safe nobody got hurt."
The director of utilities said they're going to evaluate all of their circuits to figure out what went wrong to stop it from happening again.
