Double Whammy Tsunami Power Surge

Last night Sue and I were relaxing watching a video after a long day in Mt. Hagen buying supplies and driving others around to procure their necessities. All of a sudden were heard a loud noise, a pop, and then our borrowed DVD player began belching white smoke.

When the dust had settled, we had lost our borrowed TV too, and every surge protector (including the one protecting the DVD player and TV) in the house save one. It was connected to our refrigerator. It and our microwave were the only appliances to survive.

Apparently two major power surges struck within milliseconds of each other. The first one disabled our surge protection systems, and the second overwhelmed them to affect the appliances or computers they were designed to protect. When I arrived at work today, the damage was total. We lost nearly every UPS on campus. A UPS is supposed to protect from this kind of a surge. When we checked the UPS's protection fuses, some had been blown apart. We tried to replace the old fuses with new ones, and when we did, they too failed. At last count we have lost 56 UPS systems, many monitors, most of our printers, and some computers. Thankfully our copy machines seemed to have made it through. Other people lost appliances in their houses like refrigerators, microwaves, TVs, nearly anything that was plugged into an outlet.

Today we were able to restore most of our key communications and give life to some of our most important departments (such as payroll), but our total recovery will take months. We praise the Lord that no one was hurt and that the students are away on break. With this catastrophe we will undoubtedly spend many long hours working our way out.

Pray for us as we try to find replacements for everything that was damaged, and pray for those who lost personal items. We are hoping that we can cover the loss either via the college's insurance policy or that PNG Power will compensate us. Only time will tell.

As they say about PNG, "Expect the Unexpected." And as we say God is good all the time. All the time ...