Power outages threaten research; trees smash walkway

By Mary Ann Albright


Gazette-times reporter

When studying the circadian rhythms of fruit flies, it’s crucial that specimens be incubated at regulated light and temperature cycles to simulate night and day.

So when the power went out Thursday evening throughout most of Benton County, Jaga Giebultowicz and students in her lab scrambled in the dark with flashlights, trying to finish experiments and record data.

Power in Cordley Hall, which houses Oregon State University’s zoology, botany and plant pathology research units, wasn’t restored until about 1 p.m. Friday.

Thanks to good planning and advanced warning from OSU’s emergency management team, the damage wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been, said Giebultowicz, an associate professor of zoology.

Cordley Hall doesn’t have a backup generator, and large freezers used by Giebultowicz and her colleagues rose to precariously high temperatures, she said.

Giebultowicz is among those faculty members advocating for an emergency generator for Cordley.

“We all went dangerously close to meltdown. Fortunately, we didn’t,” she said.

The university set up a portable generator outside Cordley, and researchers wheeled their freezers into the building’s hallways and tried to plug them in with cords stretched through the windows.

Unfortunately for Giebultowicz, her freezer’s plug wasn’t compatible with the generator.

She thinks the equipment and supplies will be all right, but she has to throw away between 600 and 700 flies, which it took five to six weeks to prepare.

“They have to be kept in precise light-dark cycles,” she said.

The Agricultural and Life Sciences Building has a backup generator, but even that failed at times during the outage.

“It killed us,” said Keith Nylin, a graduate student in biochemistry and biophysics working in professor Joseph Beckman’s lab.

On Thursday, Nylin was using a mass spectrometer to determine the metal content in a protein found in rat spinal cord tissue. This protein is linked to Lou Gehrig’s disease in humans.

Nylin won’t be able to turn the equipment back on until Monday, and then will have to wait between 12 and 24 hours for the pressure to drop enough for him to resume experiments.

He’s also worried that the animal tissues Beckman’s lab has stored in freezers may have gotten too warm.

“We won’t know until we run them. Cross your fingers,” he said.

Carin Huset Ness, a doctoral student in chemistry, said the outage cost her precious time in the lab.

“I’m trying to graduate soon, so I’m freaking out,” said Huset Ness, who works in Jennifer Field’s lab.

“What a nightmare,” added Nylin.

But it’s a nightmare that could have been much worse, the students agreed, had OSU not given them ample warning that outages were likely to occur.

When the lights started flickering, researchers turned off their equipment and stopped running experiments, to minimize loss of time and potential damage to expensive instruments.

Facilities services has been working around the clock to restore normal campus operations as quickly as possible, OSU spokesman Todd Simmons noted.

Some in facilities services worked all night Thursday, and continued to deal with the storm’s aftermath Friday.

“We’re very busy. Everything we had down in scheduled work today was put on hold. The whole day was consumed with storm-related work,” said Greg Riutzel, refrigeration mechanic.

Every building on campus had power restored by 2 p.m. Friday, but cleanup will extend through next week, said Stuart Larson, electrical supervisor.

Between 12 and 15 felled trees peppered campus, including two large ones in front of Callahan Hall, visible to motorists driving along Jefferson Avenue, and one in the back yard of Azalea House, a co-operative residence. One of the trees smashed through the covered walkway in front of Callahan, a dormitory.

Despite the downed trees and a large quantity of debris spewed across campus, there were no injuries and no major damage to buildings, Simmons said.

OSU’s emergency management team, which included representatives from facilities services, public safety, environmental health and safety, and news and communications, had been following the weather reports for several days, and anticipated the outage.

The team regularly updated OSU’s online homepage and a hotline to keep people abreast of the power situation on campus.

Some buildings could not be occupied until about 3:30 p.m. Friday, after environmental health and safety crews checked ventilation systems to ensure there were no harmful fumes inside.

There was not yet an estimate how much the outage will cost the university in terms of labor and backup generator expenses, Simmons said.

“Whatever the cost is, it is a fraction of what it could have been. We dodged a bullet. Our facilities services department did a great job of anticipating needs and being proactive,” Simmons said.

Mary Ann Albright covers higher education. She can be reached at maryann.albright@lee.net or 758-9518.