Where were you when the lights went out at Stanford? For many of the alums and their families who came to campus for Reunion-Homecoming 1996, that's an easy one: just getting ready for dessert after a catered dinner on the Quad.
At 7:15 on October 10, the first night of the annual weekend of festivities, a 12,000-volt fuse blew at the main campus power plant. Electricity shut down across campus, stranding students in elevators, halting scientific experiments and leaving the dinner on the Quad with no electric lights and no public address system for the night's featured speaker: President Gerhard Casper.
For the Stanford Alumni Association staff that plans and executes the weekend, the power outage was just another test of their resourcefulness. "We always have a backup rain plan," says Cindy Pearson, '80, who heads the SAA Reunion-Homecoming team, "but we didn't have a backup electricity plan."
No matter. After a few minutes of chaos, organizers were calling in reinforcements. They lined up a fleet of golf carts so that their headlights illuminated the caterer's portable kitchen. Staffers also lit a path out of the Quad with 180 spare votive candles.
And dessert--a fancy strawberry shortcake--was served.
"I thought it was a charming addition to the evening," says Patrick Maveety, '51, echoing the sentiments of many of the night's diners.
The blackout hardly short-circuited the four-day event, which drew record attendance of 6,254. The receptions, dinners, informal classes, happy hours, roundtable discussions, seminars and open houses simply continued with an added dash of improvisation.
President Casper postponed his speech until Friday morning, following a roundtable discussion on "Saving Our Cities" at MemAud. By then, electricity had only been restored to parts of campus. In listing his top priorities for Stanford, the president joked that No. 5 on the list--improving the University's physical structure--should now be considered No. 1.
Meanwhile, reunion staffers hastily shifted events to new venues, shuttling alums in a fleet of golf carts and directing them with a never-ending supply of red and white signs. Power was fully restored by Friday afternoon. By the time the reunion ended on Sunday, the celebrants had attended 359 separate events. Tailgaters consumed 32,400 barbecued ribs, the phrase, "you haven't changed a bit," was overheard a few hundred times and 54 kids spent an electricity-free night at Cardinal Kids Camp (complete with flashlight scavenger hunt).
The power failure was, in fact, Stanford's worst in 17 years. To add to the novelty, the malfunction was likely caused when rats crawled through an underground conduit and stepped on a switch at the Cardinal Cogeneration Plant, which provides power throughout much of the campus. Workers found two charred rats at the scene of the breakdown.
The blackout also showed just how essential the campus is to the Internet. About 400 businesses and organizations--including Genentech, Pacific Bell, Hewlett-Packard and the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner--lost e-mail and world wide web access when campus computers used as a cyber-hub by a major online provider went down.
For Pearson and her team, such complexities are already being factored into the backup plans for next year's reunion-Homecoming. The rest of the preparation is also under way. "Of course, it'll probably be something totally unexpected that goes wrong," she says with a wry smile. "Who knows? Maybe the water pipes will break."
