"Unfortunately, as crazy as it seems in this time and day, animals, and particularly squirrels, cause a lot of our disruptions," said Ken Garber, the community relations representative at Western Mass Electric Company (WEMCO), which is solely responsible for providing the College with electricity. "Squirrels can do a lot of damage; they're really a nuisance."
The outage, which occurred at approximately 8:15 a.m. on Sunday, initially affected almost 700 WEMCO customers, including the College. All but 25 of those customers had power restored within minutes when the problem was isolated and power was looped from an alternate source.
"For a power outage, it went rather well," said Director of Facilities Planning and Management James Brassord. "There were no contingency situations that need to be investigated further."
Amherst's computer network has uninterruptible systems that rely on reserve power supplies to protect it from power failures, according to Co-Director of Systems, Network and Telecommunications John Manly. However, the outage lasted long enough to drain the network's reserve, causing it to fail for the second time in a week.
"When the power came back on, a number of the network components were damaged," said Manly. "This was caused by the extended power failure, perhaps in combination with a spike or fluctuation prior to the failure."
Early last week, the Nimda virus epidemic caused massive failures, necessitating the rebuilding of servers that were infected. The email system and main file servers are now set up with virus scanners to detect that virus, but reports continue to surface of personal computers and smaller servers that may still be infected.
"I certainly hope that there won't be more of what we've seen this last week," said Manly. "To my knowledge, there's nothing that indicates we should have any more major problems."