Kelly Fang/File

Power was fully restored to all buildings on the UC Berkeley campus as of Friday morning after a Sept. 30 explosion near California Hall damaged underground power lines and left 11 buildings unable to connect to the campus’s power grid.

Most of the 11 buildings without power were connected to portable generators rented by the campus in the days after the explosion and were reconnected to the main power grid between Tuesday night and early Friday morning. The process of switching from the backup generators to the campus power grid left those buildings without power for up to six hours, said Christine Shaff, communications director for the campus’s facilities services department.

“It was a fairly straightforward process,” Shaff said. “We did schedule the switch-over in coordination with the building occupants. I think everybody was anxious to be off of the generators.”

One student was hospitalized in the explosion, which forced a campuswide evacuation and caused the campus to declare a state of emergency. The explosion occurred after a power outage campus officials attributed to damage from theft of copper wiring at an off-campus electrical facility. Power was restored to all but 11 buildings on campus the next day.

Dwinelle Hall was brought back onto the campus power grid Tuesday night. Three locations that had been without power since the explosion — Edwards Track, the campus cogeneration plant and Environmental Health and Safety — were restored Wednesday.

California Hall, Durant Hall and the Bancroft and Doe libraries were connected to the power grid Wednesday night. Haas Pavilion, Dwinelle Annex and the Alumni House were connected by early Friday morning.

According to Shaff, the delay in restoration occurred because maintenance workers and a “high-voltage team” needed time to assess the damage from the explosion, remove damaged equipment and test power lines to make sure they were safe.

“It’s not just repairing the damage,” Shaff said. “It’s also understanding what we needed to do.”

On Oct. 1, maintenance crews removed a damaged switchboard at the site of the explosion. Switchboards allow crews to switch between two lines of the campus power grid. With the two-line system, power can be delivered to buildings when only one line is operational, allowing crews to conduct maintenance without disrupting the flow of power.

According to Skip Ray, an accounts manager at Peterson Power, the company leased seven generators of five different sizes to UC Berkeley, ranging from 150 to 800 kilowatts. Generators can cost between a “couple hundred” to a “few thousand” dollars a day, Ray said.

Except for pending repairs to the electrical vault from which the Sept. 30 explosion originated, the restoration of the campus power grid represents a return to normalcy after the incident. Shaff estimates the caution tape around the vault will remain for “a few days.”

Chris Yoder covers crime. Contact him at cyoder@dailycal.org and follow him on Twitter @christiancyoder.

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Kore Chan/File

An ASUC Senate bill introduced Wednesday criticizes the UC Berkeley administration’s decision to hold the majority of classes on Oct. 1 after an explosion left most of campus without power the previous evening.

The bill, authored by Independent Campaign for Common Sense Senator Solomon Nwoche, calls on administrators to promptly inform students of class cancellations after emergencies. The bill will be discussed at an ASUC Senate committee meeting Monday night.

After an explosion near California Hall on the evening of Sept. 30, electrical crews worked through the night to bring power back to campus buildings.

At 5:30 a.m. on Oct. 1, campus officials notified students, faculty and staff that power had been restored to all but 11 buildings, including Dwinelle Hall.

Classes took place as normal in all buildings except those 11, to the dismay of many students who felt they had been inconvenienced by power outages in several campus residence halls the night before.

“Even best-case scenario, let’s say your assignment didn’t have any technology component — you were stuck reading in the dark,” Nwoche said regarding students living in the residence halls.

The bill, SB 27, lambastes the campus’s choice to hold most classes as usual, calling it an “irrational decision,” but also lauds Chancellor Nicholas Dirks’ acknowledgement that there was a lack of communication from campus administrators after the incident.

The bill’s text suggests implementing a campus policy whereby administrators inform students of class cancellations before 1 a.m. after an emergency. Nwoche said he would like the bill’s language to be amended to request that the announcement come within a seven- to eight-hour window after an emergency, with classes being automatically canceled after that time.

Claire Holmes, associate vice chancellor for public affairs, explained the challenges of pinning down parameters for campus emergency response.

“It is hard to dictate emergency situations because they are unpredictable and constantly evolving,” she said. Holmes does, however, agree that students and staff ought to be given as much notice as possible of class cancellations.

Both Student Action Senator Sahil Pandya and SQUELCH! Senator Grant Fineman support having a discussion about the campus’s response after the incident, but said they remain uncertain about the text of the bill itself.

“The bill comes from a very good place,” Fineman said. “It’s important in a big disaster to get information out to students quickly and efficiently, but I do understand that the administration was dealing with a lot of moving parts.”

CalSERVE Senator Briana Mullen said she would not vote for the current iteration of the bill.

“We need to be smart about when we use bills,” Mullen said. “If we don’t make policy in tandem with administrators, they are not going to respect it.”

ASUC President DeeJay Pepito said she plans to work with students and administrators to review campus outreach during emergency situations.

“The process is ongoing and continuously improving,” Pepito said in a text message forwarded from her chief of staff, Austin Pritzkat.

Contact Kimberly Veklerov at kveklerov@dailycal.org.

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I was stuck in an elevator in Barrows for 88 minutes — and then there was a fireball on campus.

It wasn’t as scary as it sounds, except for those two seconds in the elevator when I misunderstood the student worker who was helping us and thought she was informing us of the possibility that we may plummet to our deaths. Someone finally came to help us, and I acquired the skill of knowing how to open an out-of-order elevator door. I jumped onto the fourth floor, finally leaving that box that constituted our world for 88 minutes (not to be dramatic or anything), and soon after I left the building, I got a call from a friend telling me to get as far away from campus as possible, right away, because there had just been an explosion near California Hall.

You know this by now. The news is all over the Internet. Within hours, a page popped up on my Facebook suggesting I buy a shirt that said, “I Survived Explosive Midterms — Cal 2013.” There are memes and pictures showing how studious we Berkeley students are; my favorite is the image of a sea of students’ faces in a dark classroom, half illuminated by their iPhone screens, scribbling away, completely unaware of the chaos that was about to break out around them.

I was heading down Bancroft when I got the call, and the panic in his voice made me turn to my right. The big gray cloud that from afar I thought was fog turned out to be smoke from the fire that had just erupted. I got to Telegraph and Durant and watched the masses of students anxiously walking or sprinting across the street, everyone glancing back at the disarray behind. The sirens occupied the surrounding air with their shrieks as the campus blinked with the fire trucks’ lights. A general sense of panic seemed to be spreading throughout Sproul Plaza.

My friends came out, and we stared at the smoky sky, wondering whether we would have class tomorrow (of course we did) and whether this meant any deadlines we had would be pushed (of course they weren’t). As I looked up at the Berkeley sky, I had a flashback: It’s July, and I’m standing right outside the Syrian border, staring up at the half-Turkish, half-Syrian sky. I am listening to a man tell me about the rumor going around that said that the camp we worked at will be bombed soon. “So keep looking up at the sky like you do, and run away from explosions, OK?”

I nod yes and keep my eyes glued on my beloved country’s clear blue sky, decorated with wispy white streaks. I wondered what my reaction would be if I saw a plane approaching: Would I freeze, or would I shout and start running? And then I thought, would running even help me? A feeling of helplessness slowly trickled throughout my body and gradually took over. My brain seemed to place me in someone else’s shoes, subjected me to someone else’s emotions, someone who is watching a bomb fall down on her country, her city, her house, herself.

It is painful, knowing thousands have had to answer the question of whether running is beneficial. It is even more painful knowing those people and I shared the same nationality, the same land.

I stood on that corner of Bancroft and Telegraph, watching students rush toward my side of the street, and thought, this is a small glimpse of what it must be like to be in my country. My friend, commenting on the excitement of the day and explaining why he so desperately needed a drink, said, “An explosion. That doesn’t happen every day.”

But it does. It is happening every day. And it’s not because wiring was stolen but because people are purposefully dropping bombs on others. And it really is horrible that some of our fellow Berkeley students were hurt, and all of our prayers are going out to them. But I want to point out that my fellow citizens are not only hurt but are dying, on a daily basis. In their homes, their schools, everywhere.

The explosion in Berkeley reminded me — not that I needed a reminder — of what drives me to be here, the reason I listen to professors talk about human rights and conflict-management strategies. Everyday life in Berkeley, whether it’s another normal day or a huge-fireball-on-campus kind of day, speaks of Syria to me.

It’s as Walt Whitman said,

“I was looking a long while for Intentions,

For a clew to the history of the past for myself, and for these

chants — and now I have found it,

It is not in those paged fables in the libraries, (them I neither

accept nor reject,)

It is no more in the legends than in all else,

It is in the present — it is this earth to-day.”

The post An explosion here and bombs there appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Kelly Fang/Senior Staff

An electrical wire theft, which UC Berkeley officials believe may be linked to the on-campus explosion, is part of a larger trend of copper thefts on campus and in the city.

Although UCPD is conducting an ongoing investigation of Monday’s theft of high-voltage copper wiring from a campus electrical facility, multiple instances of copper theft — from construction materials, decorative plaques and even toilet flushers — have occurred on campus.

The copper wiring was taken from a facility near the Big C trail, according to a UCPD Daily Activity Bulletin. The incident, however, highlights a prevalence of copper theft at UC Berkeley that, while sporadic, is costly to the campus.

Police are actively investigating the theft but do not have any suspects at this time, UCPD spokesperson Lt. Eric Tejada said.

“We have some leads in the case — there was evidence left behind,” Tejada said. “We are hoping to get some fingerprint or DNA evidence off of it.”

Tejada said that copper theft is something UCPD deals with on a regular basis on campus and that thieves commonly cash in the metal at recycling centers.

On Jan. 20, 2011, a grand theft of 500 pounds of copper wiring from Memorial Stadium while it was still under construction cost the campus $2,000, according to UCPD crime logs.

These thefts are not always crimes of opportunity but are often highly planned, Berkeley Police Department records show.

On Aug. 22, a theft of 30 feet of copper coaxial communication cable from a utility pole in northwest Berkeley interrupted telephone and cable television service to numerous homes in the surrounding area, according to a police alert on the city of Berkeley’s website.

Similar incidents occurred in a nearby city, where witnesses reported seeing a boom-equipped utility truck and workers who were wearing hard hats and orange safety vests and appeared to be doing “legitimate work,” according to the alert.

Thefts of copper increase as the price per pound increases, so because the current price of copper is on the rise, the city and its citizens must be even more vigilant, said BPD spokesperson Officer Jennifer Coats in an email.

As of Thursday evening, the price of high-grade copper is $3.26 per pound, according to NASDAQ’s website. Local metal recycling companies said they typically buy used copper at a price between $1.50 to $3.00 per pound, depending on quality.

Rafael Pinedo of Lakeside Non-ferrous Metals, a metal recycler in Oakland, said nonferrous metals are typically sold to the company at the 100-pound minimum after a screening process and 72-hour wait period.

Local police monitor the sale and purchase of scrap metal in the Bay Area and have a system in place to notify recyclers about stolen metal. Paul Forkash, the founder of Aaron Metals in Oakland, believes that middlemen are available to take the metal to be sold in different regions.

“There are some people who are not permitted, have no business license, that will buy metal off the street and will load up a truck to take it to Southern California or Nevada,” Forkash said. “The material could be very identifiable, but yet it is being transported so far out of the area that (police) would have no way of tracking it.”

Chase Schweitzer covers crime. Contact him at cschweitzer@dailycal.org and follow him on Twitter @ChaseSchweitz.

The post Recent copper thefts part of larger campus and city trend appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Although the WarnMe alert system drew some criticism in 2011 after many did not receive notification about a shooting at Haas School of Business, the campus’s multiple warning systems appear to have been utilized effectively during Monday’s power outage and explosion, campus officials said.

Campus police and officials used nearly all emergency systems in place to respond to the events — including WarnMe, the campus siren-and-PA system and the emergency phone line, which played a looped message with updates on the situation. Messages were also posted on the campus public affairs website, Facebook and Twitter pages, according to campus spokesperson Janet Gilmore.

UCPD sent four messages via WarnMe, said UCPD spokesperson Lt. Eric Tejada.

After the explosion near California Hall about 6:40 p.m., a message went out at 6:50 p.m. telling recipients to evacuate campus immediately due to an emergency.

“We know that there will be situations where individuals maybe might get (WarnMe messages) late or not receive them,” Gilmore said. “We will be taking a close look at what worked and what needs to be improved.”

Gilmore encouraged students who did not receive text message alerts to update their information through the BearFacts website and choose text messaging as the preferred option for receiving emergency communication.

Senior Christophe Hansen-Estruch was studying at C.V. Starr East Asian Library when the campus initially lost power.

“There was this noise like a ‘bmf,’ and then all the lights went off,” he said.

After a few minutes of confusion, a library staff member went up each floor to inform students that there had been a power outage and that there was no immediate emergency, he said.

Hansen-Estruch also said he received an email from WarnMe, but because he did not sign up for text alerts, he received the warning much later.

UCPD used the campus PA system to send broadcasts instructing individuals to leave campus after the explosion occurred. Throughout the evening, police officers entered and checked campus buildings to ensure all individuals had been evacuated, Gilmore said.

The campus’s emergency systems effectively served their purpose, said UCPD Lt. Marc DeCoulode.

Although the residence halls did not need to be evacuated Monday night, the campus will work with city officials to find suitable areas for relocation in case the need arises in the future, said Amina Assefa, manager at the campus’s Office of Emergency Management.

“We would start looking for open spaces in the city of Berkeley and start directing people,” she said. “We would also use campus transportation services if we have to move people further away.”

Contact Jessie Lau at jlau@dailycal.org.

The post Campus emergency systems aided evacuations Monday night appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Alex Turney/Staff

Tiffany Cheng, Shelby LeBlanc and Sarah Dadouch had just descended past the sixth floor of Barrows Hall when the lights in the elevator began to flicker.

They had just finished their work on the seventh floor: LeBlanc and Dadouch turned in papers, and Cheng was attending office hours. They hoped the power outage was temporary, passing the dimmed lights off as a technical hiccup. Then, with a groan, the elevator jolted to a halt.

The elevator’s standstill was caused by a widespread power outage that occurred at 4:30 p.m. Monday afternoon. The students were only three of the 20 trapped in elevators across campus.

“My heart started beating really fast,” Cheng said. “I kept thinking that I had to get out, because I couldn’t miss my meetings. I kept thinking, ‘I hope this doesn’t take too long.’ I was definitely really nervous.”

Dadouch called UCPD, which assured the trio that help would eventually come. The girls began to joke about the situation, later talking about their favorite TV shows as Dadouch, a staff member of The Daily Californian, used her phone to check what was going on around campus. Staff members who worked in Barrows stood outside on the landings, shouting to make sure they were OK.

“I was just like, ‘Oh well, I guess this is happening, I’m just going to chill,’ ” LeBlanc said. “I use elevators a lot, so I thought eventually something like this would happen.”

In the elevator next to them, however, a student who had been trapped alone began to panic. They did not realize someone was inside until she began yelling, repeatedly pressing the alarm button in her elevator. Eventually, another staff member in the building noticed and began trying to calm her down. The student, according to LeBlanc and Cheng, eventually relaxed and started blasting music on her phone: Beyonce and Jamie Foxx’s “Blame it on the Alcohol.”

They were eventually freed from the elevator at 6:06 p.m. after being trapped for 89 minutes.

Across campus, another narrative was unfolding.

Sophomore Ciarra Jones and senior Tiarra Pittman were sitting in Evans Hall when the power went out. When they realized what was happening, Jones and Pittman started knocking on elevator doors to see whether anyone was inside.

On the third-floor elevator landing, they found a male student stuck inside the car, suspended between floors. After checking that he was okay, Jones and Pittman went to the second floor to the other elevator and found a female student inside.

“The strangest thing was that people were congregated around the elevator, but nobody knew she was in there because she didn’t make a noise,” Jones said. “She seemed to be panicking, though. We called 911 immediately and reported that she had shortness of breath and panic attacks.”

Firefighters arrived after 45 minutes and took an additional 30 minutes to free the two, Jones and Pittman said. The firefighters coached the trapped students in finding the mechanism of the car that opens the elevator doors. While the female student was able to find it, the male student experienced more difficulty.

Eventually, he managed to pry the doors open with brute strength, Jones and Pittman said. Both students walked away unharmed. It was 6:30 p.m., and they had been stuck for nearly two hours.

Both Jones and Pittman said they thought the rescue was conducted inefficiently due to the delayed response time. However, Acting Deputy Fire Chief Avery Webb said due to the high volume of distress calls during the time, the firefighters had to approach the situation differently — especially because some protocol moves, such as resetting the elevators, were unavailable due to the lack of power. Webb said other UC officials were rescuing the students as well.

“If we have five elevator rescues that are happening all simultaneously, they’re generally going to be first come, first served, unless in one we find out that a person is in some kind of distress,” Webb said.

The eerie quiet that the trapped students experienced was an odd contrast to the rising panic on campus that their phones relayed. Cheng vaguely sensed that something was amiss when she exited the Barrows elevator and hurried home — not long before an explosion shook the campus.

“I just had a bad feeling,” she said. “The fog had rolled in quickly — everything was so morbid and all gray. The campus was buzzing with tension, and I just wanted to get home.”

By 8:41 p.m. Monday evening, the university tweeted that everyone stuck in the elevators had been released.

Staff writer Connor Grubaugh contributed to this report.

Sophie Ho is the lead campus life reporter. Contact her at sho@dailycal.org.

The post Students trapped in elevators during campus power outage, explosion appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Michael Drummond/Senior Staff

UC Berkeley received national media attention Monday night following a bizarre series of events that culminated with an explosion near California Hall and the swift evacuation of campus.

By midnight, the campus was eerily dark, empty except for the flashing lights of fire engines and the haze of lingering smoke.

A series of innocuous disruptions

It began with a campuswide power outage at 4:30 p.m.

Students in Doe Memorial Library, who were evacuated when the lights shut off and fire alarms were triggered, were surprised to find that students in Moffitt Library and other buildings were experiencing similar confusion.

“I figured I’d get in some last-minute cramming (when) all of the buzzers and fire alarms in the North Reading Room went off,” said Max Morton, a campus sophomore. “Everyone was looking around, clearly really confused. Then I headed over to Moffitt, and everyone’s pouring out of there too.”

Within 15 minutes, both UCPD and Berkeley Fire Department were responding to reports of black smoke at locations across campus. According to Acting Deputy Fire Chief Avery Webb, firefighters at Koshland Hall discovered a plume of smoke coming from a backup generator.

That was when the calls started pouring in, Webb said. BFD dispatchers, hearing reports of smoke clouds, strange odors and people trapped in elevators campuswide, quickly passed word on to crews across the city.

“The system was on the verge of being overwhelmed by calls coming in from different places,” Webb said.

By 5:15 p.m., Berkeley Fire Department was so overwhelmed with calls that officials requested crews from Alameda County Fire Department to cover duties at fire stations in the city, Webb said.

Meanwhile, a similar spectacle developed outside Sather Tower in response to the release of smoke from another underground generator. One of the backup generators, which automatically starts in the event of a widespread power outage, was running and emitting smoke, which is typical of the system, said UCPD officer Barry Boersma. UCPD, along with Berkeley Police Department and BFD, was present at the scene.

About 5:20 p.m., firefighters evacuated Latimer Hall after students and faculty smelled ammonia in the building. According to Webb, the chemical escaped into the building when a laboratory circulation fan shut down after the power outage, but concentrations were never high enough to cause serious harm.

“A small amount of ammonia can produce a large amount of odor,” Webb said. “Most of what was being done was precautionary.”

As responders began to stem the tide of stuck elevators, a lull in the action emerged about 6 p.m.

“It looked like things were winding down,” Webb said.

The big bang

About 6:40 p.m., the lull ended.

Officials at their makeshift command post on the west side of the Campanile turned abruptly at the sound of a large explosion originating from an electrical vault just downhill, according to UCPD Lt. Marc DeCoulode.

Campus sophomore Jennifer Han was walking past Wheeler Hall on her way home from a midterm review session when the explosion sent her and other students sprinting in the opposite direction.

“The first thing I thought was, ‘What the heck is going on?’ ” Han said. “I initially thought it was a bomb and just wanted to run away. As I was leaving, someone was yelling through a megaphone, but everyone kept walking towards the area.”

A fire engine waiting to respond to another call was parked just 30 to 40 feet away from the explosion, DeCoulode said. Four people sustained minor injuries from the blast, one of whom was taken to the hospital to be treated for minor burn injuries.

At the command post, DeCoulode and other leaders made a quick decision to evacuate the campus. A number of similar electrical vaults are spread across campus, and first responders were worried they would burst as well, he said.

Officers spent the rest of the night checking buildings for malfunctioning elevators and other problems, DeCoulode said.

The aftermath

UC Berkeley will now begin investigating the events that led up to the power outage and explosion, said campus spokesperson Dan Mogulof.

Authorities determined early on that the power outage was caused by damage from vandals attempting to steal copper ground wiring in a manhole a half-mile east of campus. Whether this is also related to the explosion is still unknown, Mogulof said.

An entry from the UCPD crime log shows a burglary of copper wire and other ground wires was reported on Sept. 17 at the Big C Trail.

UCPD Lt. Eric Tejada confirmed that this burglary is the incident officials believe is related to the outage and said that high-voltage wire was stolen.

Mogulof said the vandals had a sophisticated understanding of what they were doing due to their ability to locate the access point and the amount of pressure they were able to apply to the wiring.

“These are people who understand their illicit business and know where the access or weak points are of any electrical grid,” Mogulof said.

Another explosion occurred nearly three weeks ago in an underground high-voltage vault, causing a power outage in several buildings. At the time, officials said that the explosion, located near Evans Hall, was a result of construction. Mogulof said the campus has no reason to believe the two incidents are related.

However, the campus is “open to the possibility that there might be something systemic,” Mogulof said. “Just because that’s what we assessed at the time doesn’t mean we’re going to stick to that.”

Chase Schweitzer contributed to this report.

Contact Adrianna Dinolfo and Connor Grubaugh at newsdesk@dailycal.org.

The post Explosion, evacuation prompt inquiry into day’s events appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Yesterday was a pretty crazy day for students at UC Berkeley. On Monday evening, the campus was evacuated in response to an explosion near California Hall.

As if the national government’s shutdown and the on-campus explosion weren’t enough, students also had to deal with a consequent loss of wi-fi and power at many locations around Berkeley. Desperate students turned dormitory hallways into makeshift libraries, capitalizing on the fact that the common areas were lit. In short, conditions were near-apocalyptic.

It was only a matter of hours before the Internet exploded with memes, tweets and posts responding to the literal explosion. Here are some of our favorites.

Students didn’t let the power outage distract them from the important things …

like coffee…

Remember, it’s a double.

or lecture. 

Not even a campus emergency can deter UC Berkeley students.

This picture received more than 600,000 views.

Concert or class?

Some people were worried … 

Some were more blase …

Some students had their own interpretation of what was going on …

And others tried to capitalize on the situation. 

Or bought this shirt:

Berkeley students, we’re always so forward-thinking:

But then, the bigger picture started to emerge:

Typical Berkeley:

The post Reactions to the UC Berkeley explosion, as told by the Internet appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Carli Baker/Senior Staff

UPDATED 4:33 p.m. — Although power has been restored to most of UC Berkeley after an explosion and a subsequent campuswide evacuation, 11 buildings remain without power as of Tuesday afternoon.

Students should assume classes held in those buildings are canceled, according to a statement released by UC Berkeley. According to campus spokesperson Dan Mogulof, 113 classes were canceled today.

The nonoperational buildings include Alumni House, Bancroft Library, California Hall, Central Heating Plant, Doe Library, Durant Hall, Dwinelle Hall, Dwinelle Annex, Edwards Track (East and West areas), Haas Pavilion and the Office of Environment, Health & Safety facility.

Backup generators are being installed at Dwinelle Hall, Bancroft Library, Doe Library and California Hall, Mogulof said at a press conference Tuesday afternoon. The other seven buildings will remain off the campus grid until the campus has fully assessed the damage.

“We don’t want to reconnect it for fear that we may bring everything else crashing down again,” he said.

At an earlier press conference Monday, Mogulof reiterated that the power outage that occurred at 4:30 p.m. was caused by damage to cables caused by vandals who were attempting to steal copper crucial to the campus’s power system. However, he said whether this damage was the direct cause of the explosion is still being determined.

Mogulof called the damage to the wiring “extensive” and said it was much worse than officials had initially believed when discovered late last week.

He also said that the explosion, which occurred just outside California Hall about 6:40 p.m., happened when the team was bringing power back to campus.

The campus is taking steps to increase the security of the copper substation where the vandals damaged the wiring, Mogulof said. He added that the facility is within half-mile to a mile radius of the explosion.

“It was unprecedented,” Mogulof said. ”There wasn’t anything to suggest that we had that sort of vulnerability. We’re in a new world here where people are stealing copper out of the university’s electrical grid. We have to adapt to what the new normal looks like.”

Mogulof said that the robbers had a “highly sophisticated” understanding of where one could access the sort of copper found in the substation.

The vandals “chose a point that was secluded, that was not visible, that wasn’t regularly visited,” he said.

Officials assured members of the community it was safe to return to campus Tuesday morning in an email from Chancellor Nicholas Dirks. The email said that power to the majority of the campus buildings was restored Monday night using a “methodical approach to ensure that each building is safe to occupy.”

“Because of this method of restoration, the campus has a high level of confidence that the campus is safe,” the message said.

Mogulof said that the restoration is not a “one-stop deal” and that the campus will continue to monitor the situation.

ASUC President DeeJay Pepito posted a statement on Facebook acknowledging unease over the fact that most classes are still in session despite concerns for students’ mental and emotional well-being.

“Several people were injured from the explosion, many students were stuck in elevators for hours, campus libraries were closed, and several of the residence halls … were impacted by the power outage, all factors that produced a chaotic and stressful environment,” she said in the statement. “The uncertainties of safety made studying extremely difficult and the expectation from our University to resume with regular activity and retain properly under such unique high stress and anxiety is unacceptable.”

Pepito noted that she has been in contact with the UC Berkeley administration this morning and has asked Associate Dean of Students David Surratt to send psychologists from the Tang Center to the residence halls.

Students should check in with their academic departments for further information about classes and rescheduling, and employees who normally work in those buildings should check in with their supervisors about reporting to work, according to the statement from the campus.

UC Berkeley professor of economics Martha Olney said that while the building closures were an inconvenience, the campus did an efficient job of making alternate plans.

“I thought the classroom scheduling office was on top of things,” she said. “I appreciated their quick service, and this is good preparation for the (next) earthquake.”

Here is a Google Map pinpointing where the non-operational buildings are located:

View this map on Google Maps.

Adrianna Dinolfo and Lydia Tuan contributed to this report.
Sara Grossman is the executive news editor. Contact her at sgrossman@dailycal.org and follow her on Twitter @saragrossman.

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Kelly Fang/Senior Staff

UC Berkeley officials declared a state of emergency and evacuated the campus, following an explosion near California Hall. Here are some images from the explosion and its immediate aftermath.

The post Gallery: Explosion near California Hall appeared first on The Daily Californian.