College buildings temporarily lost electricity yesterday after a power fuse at the Dartmouth steam power plant failed at 2:30 in the morning, cutting off many electrical, hot water and BlitzMail functions on the campus.
Michael Getter, director of Facilities, Operation and Management, said the cause of the fuse's failure was unknown as of last night and will be studied in the next few days.
The power went out early in the morning and was restored to most campus locations by mid-afternoon yesterday, many students did not have hot water throughout last evening.
The delay in the recovery of those functions was due to several factors, Getter said.
He said the fuse was located in a new transformer at the College power plant, and there was not an extra fuse on hand to replace the damaged one. A new fuse was brought in from Burlington, Vt.
In addition, with the loss of power at the plant, heating oil needed to power the plant cooled to levels that prevented immediate restoration of full campus operations.
After the electricity was restored, Getter said it took several hours for the heating oil increase in temperature. Getter predicted the full power would be returned to the College by 9 p.m. last night, but said it was always a difficult process to predict. As of 9:40 p.m., not all hot water had been restored.
Getter called fixing the College power source "a complex balancing process."
All of the efforts of engineers working on the power problems were going toward fixing them, Getter said, but he added in the future their focus would switch toward understanding why the fuse failed and how to prevent another such occurrence.
"There was never any danger," he said.
An incident like this is hard to prevent, he added, calling it "an electrical failure you never can really anticipate."
