Entire Grenfell Campus closed because of electrical issues
Electrical issues have shut down all the buildings on Memorial University's Grenfell Campus in Corner Brook for Thursday, straight through to at least Friday morning.
"Today obviously is a disruption when we have to close the entire campus. My hope though is by the end of today we'll have the problem solved," said Fred Christian-Quinton, an interim vice-president of the university.
"It's not going to take too, too long. but it's unknown how long it will take."
Students and employees are asked to stay away from campus, and the university's email, phones and website are also unavailable, but staff are updating its Facebook page with the latest information.
Grenfell Campus summer camps are going ahead nearby, at Corner Brook Regional High.
A safety issue
The outage stems from an electrical problem first uncovered on July 17, when the Arts and Science Building lost power because of a faulty underground cable.
Since that time, the building has been powered by an emergency diesel generator. But work to replace the cable has run into problems, and the Christian-Quinton said that means the university has had to shut down the generator to allow crews to work safely — a move that doesn't knock out power to the rest of the university, but does disable the campus-wide fire alarm system from notifying the fire department in case of an emergency, thereby creating a safety issue.
The emergency electrical work is also costly, although how big a bill it will be is unknown.
"That is something that at this point I would not want to speculate about. It's going to be a significant cost, there's no question about that. But it's one of those things that has to be done," said Christian-Quinton.
On the bright side, Christian-Quinton said with far fewer people on campus, the issue is not causing huge problems.
"The time of the year, you couldn't ask for a better time for something like this to have happened."
