Lights flickered toward the middle of campus on a chilly but clear Sunday around 3:40 p.m., as some dorms and campus buildings lost power intermittently.

In the hallway of the second floor in Southwest Hall, residents congregated among themselves asking if each others power was out.

Goshen senior Sarah Sheldon, a resident assistant, said she was just as shocked as everyone else.

“I was in the middle of watching ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ and as soon as the lights flickered I thought to myself, this has never happened before,” Sheldon said. “I just called the Hall Director to see if he knew what was going on and he said that Northeast, Minton and us were all out of power and he was calling it in.”

But along with the power being out, sophomore Claire Conlon, a member of the WKU Swim team, said she and her roommate were left to deal with their first load of laundry possibly going unwashed.

“All the machines are broken so we’ve only been using one, and we were washing our stuff that we need for our workouts tomorrow (Monday),” Conlon said.

The power was back on in the dorms after approximately 20 minutes.

Dayton, Ohio, senior Nikkei Adenarin, a desk clerk in Minton Hall, said she thought the outage was a simple maintenance issue.

“I knew I couldn’t put the outage to weather, so I thought it was maybe a maintenance issue, or maybe something got overheated because our heat just got switched back on and it’s been hot in the lobby where I work now,” Adenarin said.

Dale Dyer, Facilities Operations manager, said he was unsure of what caused the outage.

The power was back on at 4:35 p.m., Miles McDaniel manager of Marketing and Business Development for Bowling Green Municipal Utilities.

“The outage happened at 1503 Stubbins and basically what ended up happening, we had a large limb fall over a three-phase primary,” McDaniel said. “This caused an outage, a breaker to lock open on Forrest Drive.”

McDaniel said more than 650 customers were affected by the outage.