Dabney Hall is expected to be back in operation today, after power outages caused classes to be cancelled in the building Thursday, according to Kevin MacNaughton, associate vice chancellor for facilities.

Early Thursday morning, Williams Hall and addition, Cox Hall and D.H. Hill Library experienced outages as well, Campus Police Capt. Jon Barnwell said.

He said D.H. Hill experienced power outages around 4:37 a.m., after which Campus Police received reports of similar outages at Cox, Dabney and Williams Halls.

According to Kevin MacNaughton, the outages started with an overheated transformer at Dabney.

“With that original fault, it affected the system and took out the circuits for the rest of the buildings,” he said.

The Facilities Department responded and police made sure the buildings were empty and secure, but Barnwell said upon restoring power, something malfunctioned that caused electrical equipment to overheat in D.H. Hill’s basement.

“We can’t determine whether there was a fire, [but] electrical equipment had burned out and caused sparking,” he said, which led to smoke that resembled that of a fire.

Karan Kachroo, a junior in biochemistry, said he came to the Atrium around 10 a.m. to get breakfast, but no one was allowed into the Atrium and the library.

The Raleigh Fire Department responded, and said everything inside was safe, according to Barnwell.

“We are very fortunate that damage was minimal and contained to the basement area,” Barnwell said.

According to MacNaugton, they were able to restore power to all the other buildings to conduct normal classes.

He said there were workers at Dabney installing a large emergency generator Thursday afternoon to ensure that it could function for classes today.

There were also people working to stabilize the situation in D.H. Hill and order replacement equipment to make sure there are no further problems, he said.

Kacharoo and his friend, Monica Shah, a sophomore in biological sciences, did not have classes in Dabney, but wanted to use its computers.

“A lot of computers are always being used in the library, and Dabney is the easiest place for using the Internet,” Kacharoo said.

MacNaughton said he was very satisfied with the response from facilities staff during the outages.

“We were able to pretty quickly find the problem at Dabney [and] although it was disruptive, we feel we have a very fast response in place to restore classes and reoccupy the building,” he said.