Power Outage Hits Charles River Campus
Comm Ave inbound shut down for one hour
Photo by Kalman Zabarsky
Several buildings on the Charles River Campus lost power for an hour this afternoon when an underground electric cable failed and a smoky explosion blew the cover off a manhole in front of 580 Commonwealth Avenue. No one was injured, and there was no aboveground damage. But the incident, which occurred at 1:20 p.m., forced the closure of Commonwealth Avenue inbound from the BU Bridge and shut down the Green Line inbound for almost an hour. The BU student residence at 580 Comm Ave was evacuated, as was Scoozi restaurant.
The outage, which shut down email, learning management systems and web servers, affected several buildings on the Charles River Campus, but left others with full power. Investigators from NStar are trying to determine the cause of the explosion. Power was restored to most of the campus by 2:30 p.m.
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