U of T survived the biggest blackout in North American history with relatively little damage.
“We had three instances where people were trapped [in elevators],” said Dan Hutt, manager of U of T’s police services. “Between ourselves and staff in the engineering department, they were out within an hour.”
Campus police stepped up their patrols, but there was no noticeable increase in crime, said Hutt.
The St. George campus is on the same part of the grid as the hospitals, so it got power back only eight hours after the blackout began. But because of transit and other problems, regular operations did not resume until the Monday following the blackout.
There were relatively few students on campus, since summer classes had ended. Exams scheduled for Thursday and Friday were cancelled, and students were given the option of keeping their term mark as their final mark or writing make-up exams.
The university has its own six-Megawatt natural gas power plant, which went offline with the rest of the grid. It needs outside power to be restarted, so it had to remain off until the blackout ended. The plant had been scheduled to be shut down for maintenance on the Friday following the blackout anyway, and was kept off for a few days for this purpose.
Although many sensitive experiments at U of T depend on electricity, emergency power prevented any major losses. “As far as I know, most of the vulnerable pieces of equipment were hooked up to emergency power, as were the animal facilities,” said Rosalind Waxman, a research administrator in the Faculty of Medicine. Other faculties echoed that assessment.
The emergency power was kept going by U of T staff who had to hand-pump diesel fuel for the generators, which had run low on fuel.
Power saving measures were put in place across the U of T community. An email was sent out to all departments calling on staff to turn off lights, ease up on air conditioning, and to leave photocopiers and other equipment off. The measures seemed to be working, as electricity use was down to 26 Megawatts from its normal level of 32 Megawatts on the Tuesday following the blackout. Similar measures were introduced at the university-affiliated hospitals, some of which asked staff not involved in patient care to go home at 3 p.m. each day to save power.
