By CATHY ANN SCHMIT
Campus life froze Friday afternoon as did Utah, Sanpete and Juab counties because of a widespread power outage caused by Thursday's salt and dust storm, according to Utah Power and Light officials.
Power shut off at 3:50 p.m. and rendered BYU campus inoperable until 4:20 p.m. when the power was temporarily restored, said Brent H. Harker, Director of Public Communications.
'Around 4:30 p.m. the administration began to shut down campus because those areas in the dark are dangerous and the system would overheat and be damaged because of the continuous on and off power,' Harker said.
Besides being dangerous, the university is widely run by computers and the whole system was down.
Although the power came back, the decision to shut down had already been announced. Dining services had stopped and the Franklin S. Harris Fine Arts Center performances were canceled, Harker said.
The Varsity theater was shut down, but those with tickets were allowed to go to the Saturday night showing.
The Museum of Art stayed open because it has a complete back-up generator and several athletic events were still held because people were traveling out of town and had left their homes before word could be spread, said Harker.
KBYU-FM was able to stay on the air due to a back-up generator, according to the station's secretary.
Justin Drummond, a math lab secretary, said there was no damage to the department's computer system that he knew about.
Other departments were vacated as instructed and were unavailable for comment about any damage to the system.
Friday night Harker said, 'Everything should be normal Saturday morning,' as it was.
The decision to shut down campus was made by the Emergency Operation System, Harker said.
Utah County Sheriff's Office said the salt and dust from the previous storm had left residue on the lines of several local sub-stations which caused the outage.
'The initial blackout occurred at the Timpanogos sub-station around 1 p.m. Friday and spread to the Spanish Fork sub-station where the lines had been contaminated by the salt from the last leg of the storm Thursday,' Utah Power said.
Around 7 p.m. Friday, the sheriff's office said the power was restored except in Spanish Fork, the source of the local outage, where it continued to flicker until the lines were cleaned.
Utah Power officials later said that the power had been restored everywhere