As the sun set on the Texas Tech campus in Lubbock, Texas, days before the university was set to go on spring break, pillars of green fire erupted from the ground around the campus.
This, coupled with explosions heard around campus on Wednesday night and the campus power substation being knocked offline, caused widespread power outages across the campus.
Others are reading: Texas Tech University closes campus ahead of spring break after explosion triggers fires
This displaced students from their dorms or sleeping areas, forcing the campus into an early spring break and leaving authorities, campus officials and utility crews with two major tasks: Determining what happened and repairing the damage.
As the sun rose the next day, emergency crews could still be seen working on campus, with portions still left in the dark.
This event led several Texas Tech and City of Lubbock officials to create a timeline of events, provide updates regarding power restoration and some insight into preliminary findings.
Officials release preliminary timeline of Texas Tech explosions, fires
Capt. Amy Ivey said the Texas Tech Police Department started receiving calls about 6:40 p.m. Wednesday, March 12, reporting power outages around campus.
Matt Rose, chief public affairs officer for Lubbock Power & Light, said it was only a few minutes later that LP&L’s system noticed a defect in one of the circuits that services the north and eastern portions of the campus and automatically cut power to it.
Approximately 17 minutes later, Ivey said those initial calls changed to reports of smoke coming out of manholes around the campus’ Engineering Key — north of Memorial Circle.
“Once our officers responded, they did see the smoke and some fire coming out of the manhole,” Ivey said. “At that time, they reached out to the Texas Tech Fire Marshals and the Lubbock Fire Department to respond on scene.”
The university then sent out a campus-wide alert around 7:12 p.m., notifying students, faculty and staff that the campus was experiencing several power outages. About 18 minutes later, the university issued an evacuation order for its Engineering Key.
Videos and photos posted to social media showed pillars of green fire bursting from manholes from various spots around campus.
Around 7:30 p.m., Rose said additional circuits started to automatically trip on campus, impacting 123 meters.
“At 8 p.m. … we began manually taking down circuits,” Rose said. “Again, as a preventive measure to make sure that we keep the area safe. That’s one of the first things we have to do so that the next steps can take place.”
However, in doing so, 3,449 LP&L customers were affected in Lubbock, but crews were able to quickly restore power to them.
Those on campus also recounted hearing an explosion from the LP&L Brandon Substation on campus, which caused massive outages to the university and its sister campus across the street — TTU Health Sciences Center.
Rose confirmed that the substation at one point during the night was on fire; however, an investigation is underway.
“(At) midnight, our crews were able to start going into very specific manholes to start restoring power,” Rose said. “By 3 a.m., we restored every single meter that was able to be restored.”
By 2 p.m. Thursday, Rose said, power had been restored to 60% of the campus, with the power in the other 40% being kept off until it was safe for crews to do so.
Nick Wilson, assistant fire chief for Lubbock Fire Rescue, said crews on Thursday were still seeing residual natural gas readings from the night before in the underground vaults around campus that saw the fires.
LFR is still working to ventilate those areas and checking if they are safe before LP&L crews are able to enter them, assess the damage and work to restore them, as the vaults contain parts of the university’s power grid.
“I can’t tell you how long that will take,” Wilson said.
Investigation underway as to cause, extent of damage on Texas Tech campus
Officials confirmed that the State Fire Marshal’s Office is leading the investigation, with Wilson assuring the public on Thursday that the campus is safe and there is no sign of an active fire.
Wilson said the different colors of fire and smoke were likely due to different materials turning fire into various colors when burned.
“These were electrical vaults, underground electrical facilities with, probably, metal fires,” Wilson said. “Copper burns green. Likely, that’s where we were seeing.”
It remained unclear by Thursday why natural gas was detected around the time of the incident, Wilson said.
When it comes to the power infrastructure on campus, Rose said LP&L crews maintain it regularly, noting crews were on campus a week prior focusing maintenance efforts on other portions of the system.
Rose also pointed to Lubbock’s extreme weather being the culprit as to why it might have failed.
“A lot of times a storm will come through and it will cause damage, but it won’t necessarily cause enough damage to cause an outage, and so we won’t have an indication on our end that there (problems),” Rose said. “Then a week to 10 days later, that transformer fails.”
By Thursday, officials said there was no estimated date for when full power will be restored on campus; however, students are on spring break through March 24.
Impact on Texas Tech
The fires and power outages forced Texas Tech officials to close down campus Thursday and Friday, which also caused them to start spring break two days earlier than expected.
Texas Tech President Lawrence Schovanec said he and his team determined early on during the incident that the campus would send students home early.
With student safety paramount, Texas Tech’s Chief Financial Officer Noel Sloan said that students were encouraged to leave Thursday morning to take advantage of daylight. Sloan also said the university is working to accommodate those students displaced from their dorms by placing many in hotels if they were staying on campus for the break.
“We’re also working on moving up shuttle schedules from campus to the metro areas that were scheduled for spring break,” Sloan said.
A Brooks & Dunn concert that was supposed to happen Thursday in Tech’s United Supermarkets Arena was postponed until March 20 as Schovanec said the arena was working to get its HVAC system back up and running.
Texas Tech Athletics was also set to host an NCAA Selection Sunday watch party at the arena; however, that is up in the air now.
With no concrete timeline to restore power to the remainder of campus and the unknown extent of the damages, Schovanec said the university is holding off on deciding whether to welcome students back to campus after the break.
“We need to hear from the experts first as to what the timeline would be, and we’ll probably know more in a few days,” Schovanec said. “Based on their input, we’ll begin to have those discussions.”
This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Texas Tech provides details on overnight fires, explosion on campus
