Impact:  This telephone related outage affects North Hall and some other misc offices in other buildings.  This will impact multi-line Panasonic phones, fax machines and other telephone related devices.  The impact will seem random but may end up impacting up to 2/3 of North Hall and some surrounding buildings.

Cause:   Water from a plugged air conditioner condensate drain and the increased humidity levels in an older part of the building have contributed to water covering the phone infrastructure in the core of the building.

Response:  The damage to some services is significant and in other services is minor.  This will take well into the evening and night to resolve.  Technology Services has begun to pull phone services back away from the room to prevent further damage.  Facilities Management is procuring an emergency contractor to address replacing cabling and terminations this evening.   Facilities Management is scheduling air handlers to run overnight and tomorrow’s forecast lower humidity will aid in reducing the overall humidity in the building.

Future:  We will provide updates here as we have more information.  At this time we do not know how long business will be interrupted for the affected offices.  As we get an inventory of the impacted areas we will continue to provide updates on the response efforts here.  We will know more tonight and will advise on mitigation efforts as the time progresses as it is now too early to consider longer term impacts.