Commonwealth Edison and Northwestern sources have confirmed that an investigation into the late January power outages, which left more than 500 customers without power, will be concluded in the next couple of weeks.

ComEd is attempting to determine the cause of the blackout, as well as conducting tests on all 13 “feeder lines” that supply NU’s Evanston campus with its power, ComEd spokesman Peter Pedraza said.

Pedraza said that while the cause of the initial cable failure on Jan. 27 had not been determined, the line responsible had been tested and was ready to transmit power again.

Gary Wojtowicz, NU’s interim director of facilities operations, said he knew nothing more about the cause of the outages aside from the failed cable’s location. He added that power outages have fallen approximately “70 percent” since he started working at NU 35 years ago.

“They have reinvested in their distribution system and we see results,” Wojtowicz said. “It doesn’t matter what level of redundancy we have. There’s always the possibility of a single point failure on a feeder.”

– Michael Gsovski