In February a part of Redwood City, the Stanford Redwood City campus included, experienced a power outage due to arcing wires. As you may now be back on-site, this is a great opportunity to remind you about what to do in such cases.
The campus is backed up by generators, which activate in outages like the one in February. These generators, however, only provide a limited emergency power supply to the campus. Alarms, sensors, fire detection systems, emergency lighting, stairwell access, etc., remain powered on, and all non-essential usage remains offline. You will not have internet access, outlets will not work, elevators will be out of service and air handlers will be down. Card readers to enter buildings or private spaces inside are backed up by battery power. A sustained outage will hamper your overall ability to work. Please keep in mind that a lengthy outage will also affect the temperature inside the buildings. Secondly, an outage may not necessarily impact the entire campus and could be isolated to a specific building.
SRWC Operations will communicate the extent and duration of the outage based on the information provided by PG&E. However, if an outage happens, there is no safety issue nor a need to evacuate the building immediately. Your business unit will make the decision on whether to head home or not based on PG&E’s estimated outage duration and which buildings are affected.
What you need to do to stay informed:
- Sign up for SRWC AlertSU messages
- Join the SRWC Slack workspace
If you are asked to evacuate and need assistance, evacuation chairs for anyone with mobility issues are in place in each building in the south-facing stairwells (adjacent to the green belt or facing Bay Road).
Read more about power outage impacts on UIT services.
