The Department of Public Safety is in the process of repairing 24 of the 188 emergency call boxes throughout the medical center and main campus after discovering they were out of service during a routine test on Friday.

Low battery power caused the boxes to stop working, according to university spokeswoman Stacy Kerr. Though technicians were able to repair 14 of the boxes between Friday and Monday night, the remainder will be fixed in the coming days. All of the broken boxes have been labeled as such by DPS.

Nineteen of the inoperable boxes are among the 159 newer wired call boxes that DPS is able to check daily through automatic updates from the boxes. Of these boxes, five are still out of service.

“Those are expected to be fixed as quickly as the technicians are able to fix them,” Kerr said.

In the review, DPS also found that five of the university’s 22 wireless call boxes were inoperable. DPS will now be checking these older boxes, which were previously checked twice a month, once a week.

“They’re 32 years old … and showing signs of [their] age,” Kerr said.

According to her, one box has been used to make an emergency call in the past four years.

Though the boxes rarely see any use, students expressed concern that the boxes were inoperable.

“[The call boxes] symbolize some type of safety. With so many out of order, I think the effect is more psychological if anything,” Nadir Zaidi (COL ’13) said.

Priya Sharma (MSB ’15), who noticed the outages while walking with friends this weekend, agreed that the boxes typically make her feel safe.

“It made me uncomfortable to see that something [that is] supposed to provide safety … was broken,” she said.