On Thursday, 15th October, London’s “Global University” provided a taste of life on the receiving end of the Iraqi National Grid. The electricity supply to most of UCL’s Anatomy Building, Medical Sciences Building, and Darwin Building was cut off for six hours, owing to a faulty transformer on the verge of exploding.
Despite the severity of the situation, UCL staff were only warned five minutes prior to the cutoff, at around 5pm – two hours after the initial decision for the large-scale shutdown had been made. This late notice meant that many researchers had to interrupt and discard their experiments. Within the affected buildings, expensive equipment was put at risk. Indeed, a laser, worth around £100,000, was damaged due to the sudden disconnection.
Moreover, one of the world’s largest zebrafish laboratories - holding around 30,000 of the creatures - was affected by the electricity outage. Whilst this primarily brings up matters of animal welfare, it is also worth noting that the fish are fundamental to many world-class research projects at UCL.
A laser worth around £100,000 was damaged
An external emergency generator (the large noisy container opposite the Science Library) was only put in place after a two-and-a-half hour hiatus.
Professor John Carroll (Associate Dean of the Division of Biosciences) has said that the installation of an uninterrupted power supply for valuable equipment is planned in the future. However, it is shocking that such measures were not already in place, owing to a similar incident a number of years ago. On that occasion, a loss of power to fridges and freezers caused expensive lab material to defrost, with massive financial implications.