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Fry Street Fire Leaves Campus Powerless, Disconnected*By Claudia Lynch, Benchmarks Online EditorThe fate of Fry Street has been a major concern for many people in the Denton area recently, particularly those associated with UNT. It is doubtful that anyone dreamed, however, that Fry Street's fate would involve a major fire. A fire that not only brought down a Denton landmark but left parts of the UNT campus without power, voice and data communications for at least part of the day on June 28. According to CR Chevli, Manager of the CITC Data Communications Group, a good portion of the main campus lost power around midnight on June 27 when a fire gutted what was left of the Tomato Pizza restaurant, then in the process of being demolished. Fiber cable was burned at two locations causing the connection between the main campus and the Research Park to be destroyed. Charter had to install a new fiber cable and splice it at two locations to restore the service. Similarly, Verizon had to install new phone cables, and city workers had to reconnect and/or replace power lines that had burned during the fire. CITC's Patrick McLeod was on the scene and provided these photographs for us:
McLeod, who is a Research and Statistical Computing consultant in Academic Computing and User Services, also provided the photo on the index page of this issue of Benchmarks Online. That photo was taken two days after the demolition began, from the same location as the first picture on this page, the corner of Fry St. and West Oak. * This article continues the Benchmarks tradition of documenting natural -- and un-natural -- disasters that affect the campus computing community. For a blast from the past take a look at this, from February 1985.
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