"Dear Texas Tech Family, Wednesday (March 12) evening, an explosion occurred in a tunnel, causing a fire. The fire spread, leading to outages on the Texas Tech campus. Electricity and gas were shut down across both the Texas Tech and Health Sciences Center campuses in Lubbock to keep the fire from spreading further.

Texas Tech University sent students on an early spring break after spurts of green flames shot out from manholes on campus on Wednesday night. The source was an explosion at a substation that caused widespread outages across campus and the university's Health Sciences Center.