A power cut across areas of Central Oxford on Monday 27th April caused chaos for some Merton College students who were locked out of their accommodation on Holywell Street, with some preparing to take exams the following day.
The power first cut out at around 4pm on Monday afternoon. Scottish and Southern Energy Power Distribution, which supplies energy to the Oxford area, originally gave an estimated time of 6.30pm for the issue to be resolved, but this was later revised to 1am on Tuesday morning.
Other colleges such as Wadham, Hertford and New were also affected, while the eduroam Internet service was unavailable to many students for large parts of the evening.
However, it was Merton students living in Holywell who were the hardest hit, as doors to the accommodation are locked and unlocked electronically, leaving many locked out and forced to ask porters to let them in manually.
Hannah Wilson, a second year Chemistry undergraduate at Merton, told Cherwell, “At first I thought it was just my house, so I grabbed my dying phone and charger to go and borrow a friend’s electricity. I then realised that a Merton migration was starting, as people abandoned their power-less rooms for libraries, so it was evidently the whole of Holywell Street.
“The problem was, most of the Merton accommodation has an electric locking system, which means that once people had left the house, they couldn’t get back in, and had to rely on one person being in the house at all times, to run down and open the door.”
The electricity was restored to Holywell houses 1 to 7 by 9pm on the Monday evening, though the rest of the Street remained without power until 1:11am on the Tuesday morning.
Another Merton second year, studying Biology, who was taking an exam the following morning, described how students were revising by torchlight, saying, “Everyone went out to buy dinner as obviously ovens, fridges, freezers, microwaves, kettles, toasters wouldn’t work. My phone and laptop both ran out of battery. After dinner, a few of us went to Holywell 1 as they had electricity in the evening, and I worked there and charged my phone. As I have exams at the moment this was great – I had been trying to work in my room from torch light but being so dark was really not conducive to a good working environment.”
Even after the power was restored early on Tuesday morning, some students in the affected area were still unable to connect to the Internet until around 9am. A University spokesperson stressed to Cherwell that the power outage was out of the control of the university’s IT services, which had responded as soon as possible. “Loss of power across such a large area and for such a long time is exceptional, and the University is still waiting to find out from the electricity board what caused the problem,” they said.
“While the University’s IT Service did everything it could to minimise the impact of the power outage, the scale and timing of the outage meant that it took longer than expected to restore full service back to the network.”
Not everyone was downbeat about the inconvenience, however. A staff member at the King’s Arms, on the corner of Holywell Street, told Cherwell how the pub had stayedd open by candlelight until 10pm, before closing two hours earlier than the usual time of midnight. “Everyone loved it,” he said. “They said we should do it more often!”
Duncan MacDonald, a spokesperson for Scottish and Southern Energy, was unable to provide the exact cause of the outage. He said, “Our priority was, as always, to get the power back on for our customers as quickly and as safely as possible.”
