Campus Power Failure and Technology Response
The College maintains a specific administrative procedure for campus electrical failure.
Procedure CGC-II, Response Plan for Campus Electrical Failure, assigns responsibilities to Physical Plant, Campus Police, Central Utility, ISS, the telephone administrator, and College administration. The telephone administrator is a member of the Infrastructure Team.
For ISS, the current procedure specifically requires that, when notified of a power interruption, ISS personnel:
- Systematically shut down affected computer systems.
- Restore technology services after Central Utility or The Physical Plant has notified ISS that power has been restored.
- When notified of power interruptions, the telephone administrator will systematically shut down computers related to telephone system operations.
ISS now maintains backup generator power and redundant connections supporting the telephone system, core network switch, and Data Center. This infrastructure differs from the conditions described in CGC-II, and the College procedure has been identified for review and update.
ISS Expectations
During a campus power failure:
- Safety instructions take precedence.
- ISS employees should not begin an uncoordinated shutdown or restart of systems unless responsible for those systems or instructed to do so.
- Service owners and responsible technical staff should follow established shutdown and recovery procedures for their systems.
- Systems should not be restored until the appropriate College authority has indicated that power is stable and restoration may begin.
- Technology restoration should be coordinated rather than performed independently by individual employees.
Service outages resulting from an electrical failure should also follow applicable ISS incident-management and communication procedures covered in Service Management, Operations, and Documentation.