Students huddle together between Cowden and Tinsley Halls while listening to The Elevation Club sing during a campus-wide power outage. Bryan Kinkade / The Lumberjack

On Nov. 19, students suddenly discovered themselves in the dark as the power at the university and the surrounding area went out from approximately 8 p.m. to 9 p.m.

The exact cause of the outage is unknown, but Jenna Henry, an APS spokesperson, said a problem at a Flagstaff power substation caused the power outage.

“We had a [malfunction] at our Coconino substation which caused an outage,” Henry said. “While we couldn’t find the cause of the outage, [we know] it tripped for about an hour and came back on at 9:06, to be exact.”

Henry said the Coconino substation is located inside Flagstaff, and the outage did not reach the city as a whole.

“The Coconino substation is just about a mile, or a mile and-a-half, southeast of the [I-]40 [and I-]17 junction,” Henry said. “The feeder tripped, and it actually caused two 69-KZ lines — which are our major lines — to both trip, which caused the outage at NAU.”

Henry said APS is unaware of the exact radius of the outage beyond the university.

“We don’t really have a customer count, so we don’t know the extent [of the outage],” Henry said.

Adding to the general disorder of losing power across campus, a fire in the first floor of Cowden Hall broke out, which led to the building being evacuated.

Angelo Bergs, a freshman elementary education major, lives in Cowden Hall and witnessed the power outage.

“I was in my dorm room at the time of the power outage,” Bergs said.
“There were no evacuation procedures. Everyone was just hanging out in his or her dorm rooms and in the hallways. It wasn’t until the fire began on the first floor that we had to evacuate the building.”

An APS employee closes the gate as he enters the power substation on south campus across from Rolle Activity Center on Nov. 19. The power was restored to campus after students spent over an hour in the dark. Matt Beaty / The Lumberjack

At first, Bergs worried about the possibility of his dorm being on fire, and he evacuated.

“The power outage didn’t bother me, but the fire did,” Bergs said. “It’s the hall I live in. A fire is a fire. It took me a couple minutes to get over it. The power outage wasn’t too bad.”

Firefighters from the city of Flagstaff extinguished the fire in Cowden early in that hour.

Among the concerns during the blackout was the loss of power to the restaurants inside the Union, Du Bois center and Gateway center. All three shut down for the night immediately following the outage, well before their respective closing hours.

Christopher Aldridge, an employee at the Campus Markets and Pizza at the Gateway center, said the food there was being kept cold, but he implied they would be shutting down for procedural reasons.

“I have no idea if [the assumption that food businesses are losing money] is right or not,” Aldridge said. “All power is on, and our food is being refrigerated. Everything is good and refrigerated. The refrigerators are designed [to keep food cold] during an outage.”

The electricity also went out at the Flagstaff Harkins Theatre for that hour, on a night when the midnight showing of the popular new film New Moon was set to come out. Additionally, several restaurants and stores surrounding NAU went dark briefly.