The University's electrical contractors have informed us that they'll be cutting power to St Mary's dining hall at about 11:00 this morning. The switching centre in St Mary's will be affected by this, with the result that all residences and dining halls hanging off this centre will lose connectivity. These include Phelps, John Kotze, and Olive Schreiner houses and Oriel kitchen. There may be other areas local to St Mary's affected as well.
An interim power source will be installed to allow these areas to retain connectivity while the electricians are working. As a result, downtime should only be of the order of half an hour or so. Normal power will be restored late this afternoon, and there will be another half-hour outage when this happens.
There may be a repeat of this process tomorrow to allow the electricians to finish up their work in the dining hall.