MISSSOULA — It was the fourth quarter of the Montana Grizzlies' match-up against Portland State on Saturday, November 16, 2024, when suddenly Washington-Grizzly Stadium went dark. The power outage didn't just affect fans in the stadium, but also those watching from home.
Dave Kuntz, the director for strategic communications at the University of Montana, says a switch failure is to blame.
"We had a switch fail in the steam heat plant, which then killed the circuits for the stadium and the adjacent buildings,” Kuntz said.
Riley Campbell is a sophomore on the UM Dance team. She was on the field when everything went black.
“I thought the game was going to go a lot longer, but they picked it up and played their music, and then they had a scoreboard down below, so we kind of figured it out,” Campbell said.
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The power outage impacted everything from the stadium to the Adams Center to the heating plant, which heats all campus buildings including residence halls.
“We have really talented folks here at the university who deal with electrical issues and heat issues, and so right away, they went to work checking all the circuits to make sure they could find where the disruption was,” Kuntz said.
He added that staff restored power by 8 p.m. Saturday. UM is now taking steps to prevent an outage like this from happening again.
"This is really the result of an old switch and really bad timing. And going forward, we'll be able to, I think, readjust some generator capacity and other things to make sure that that does happen, we'll have some of the capabilities to keep the game day operations going a little bit longer," Kuntz said.
The power outage hit during an afternoon game, which meant the Grizzlies could continue play and Scripps Sports was able to broadcast the rest of the game at a lower capacity.
"We're grateful that we were able to get it resolved as quickly as we could. And it happened at the stage of the game that it did. But now going forward, we'll be able to learn from that and have some processes in place where, if it were to happen again, our response would be much quicker,” Kuntz said.
The Grizzlies went on to beat Portland State 28-17.
