BLACKSBURG - A broken water main knocked out power to one corner of the Virginia Tech campus late Monday, leaving dormitories dark for more than 15 hours and forcing some faculty and graduate students to scramble to preserve sensitive research projects.

The problems began around 10:30 p.m. Monday when a water main break flooded a vault of electrical switches on West Campus Drive near Wallace Hall. Roughly two dozen buildings in the southeastern corner of campus - including six residence halls - lost power and water, although some only briefly. Tech officials were forced to cancel morning and afternoon classes held in the affected buildings. Crews had restored power and water service to all of the buildings by 4 p.m. Tuesday after repairing the break in the water main and the electrical vault.

While a mere inconvenience for many, the outage posed a major threat to some of the research projects conducted in university labs.

Faculty and graduate students in the Fralin Biotechnology Center and nearby labs depleted supplies of dry ice and back-up generators from Blacksburg to Roanoke in an effort to salvage the products of years of research that were stored in refrigerators, freezers and beakers.

Students and faculty in Fralin preserve enzymes and re-agents used in their research in super-cold freezers. Other plant cultures must be kept moving through machines that gently spin the beakers. But faculty and researchers were not alerted to the power outage for roughly four hours, said Craig Nessler, head of plant pathology, physiology and weed science at Tech.

Nessler and others said the loss of enzymes and research materials that took years to grow could be particularly devastating to students nearing the end of their graduate work.

"You're talking decades of work disappearing," said John McDowell, assistant professor of plant molecular biology. McDowell said Tuesday afternoon that it was too soon to tell how many, if any, of the research projects were affected by the power loss.

Elizabeth Grabau, an associate professor of plant pathology, physiology and weed science, said she was able to transfer some of her research into freezers at her husband's lab in another building. She used dry ice to attempt to preserve the remaining samples.

"Everybody has samples that need to remain frozen," Grabau said. "All over campus, everybody is just scrambling." Elsewhere on campus, students and staff were adjusting to the temporary inconvenience.

All residence halls still had emergency lighting and enough steam heat to keep the buildings comfortable. But students had to do without the amenities that have become standard in many college dorms.

Bri McGuinness, Nicole Singer and Jayme Shepherd - all freshmen living in Ambler-Johnston West residence hall - were not fans of the cold showers or lack of in-room Internet access, television and hairdriers.

Their cellphones were dead or nearly defunct because they could not recharge them overnight.

The three were also unable to register for classes Tuesday - the first day available for freshmen - because they could not access the Internet.

"It's just annoying," said Shepherd.

Outside a darkened Dietrick dining hall, food service staff were cooking hotdogs and hamburgers on industrial-sized charcoal and propane grills in anticipation of the lunchtime crowd. Inside, crews working under lantern light were slapping together sandwiches and other dishes that didn't require electricity to prepare.

An estimated 3,500 students eat lunch daily at either Dietrick or West End Market, Tech's other dining hall which was closed due to the power outage.

"Students have been great," said Richard Johnson, director of housing and dining services at Tech. "They know ... that when you lose half of campus power, you're not going to have the same service you'd expect" on a normal day.