One unexpected feature of Sophomore summer has been the frequent blackouts that have some wondering if Hanover is reverting to the Stone Age.
Tuesday morning's power outage marked the fifth blackout to hit Hanover this July. The failures, which have caused frequent disruption and agitation for students this summer, are mainly due to the failures of three separate cables.
Local power utility Granite State Electric has met with Facilities, Operations and Management to discuss the situation and is taking the necessary measures to prevent similar outages in the future.
Currently the cause of the cable failures is unknown, according to Granite State Electric spokeswoman Jackie Barry. However, Granite State has sent the cables to be tested in order to ascertain whether they need to be replaced.
While students living offcampus have experienced the problems with greater frequency, the campus was most directly hit by the power failure on July 12 and the most recent outage on Tuesday.
According to Barry, the first of the five outages occurred July 11 when the first cable failed and caused 2,000 customers to lose power from 8:45 p.m. to 11 p.m.
While attempting to fix this problem, Granite State Electric switched customers to a back feed system in order to repair the cable.
On July 12, during the process of putting the system into normal configuration, the ground fault relay equipment caused another outage, affecting about 2,600 customers.
On July 21, 640 residents experienced yet another outage when a second cable failed, causing an outage for roughly two hours that morning.
Two days later, on July 23, a third cable failed, leaving 1,900 customers without power from 6:45 a.m. to 9 a.m.
Tuesday's power failure hit 70 customers, including the main area of campus, for about an hour starting around 10:10 a.m.
Almost every building from the Hop at the south end of campus to the Medical School at the north side lost power.
The west end of campus, including the Thayer School of Engineering and the Tuck School, which is not serviced by the main substation, was the only area that did not experience the power failure.
This most recent blackout occurred due to the failure of the loadbreak -- a piece of equipment used during switching operations.
The repeated use of the loadbreak caused by the power outages may have been responsible for this failure, according to Barry.
Granite State had to repair the switch before power could return, according to Frank Roberts in FO&M.
Classes during the 10A time slot were affected during Tuesday's blackout as some professors decided to cancel class because of the disturbance.
Courtyard Cafe in the Hop halted food service. Food Court and Collis, however, were able to continue serving a selection of food items by using handwritten sales records.
While the emergency generators for most buildings on campus operated during the outage, students were still displeased with the inconveniences caused by Tuesday morning's outage.
"I walked all the way to the library from my house at 10 a.m. only to discover all of campus had returned to the Stone Age," Amanda Dobbins '06 said.
"I had to sleep on a couch in the periodicals room until the lights came back on. Great timing during midterms."
These recent problems are somewhat of an anomaly, Barry said.
The first cable that failed has not done so since 1999, and the other two cables have never caused such an outage before.
"We regret the inconvenience this has caused customers in Hanover. We do try to provide dependable and reliable service," Barry said. "That's why we're sending the cables to be tested. Hopefully we can get this resolved as soon as possible."
In the meantime, students' frustrations will continue to mount.
"I am really sick of resetting my clock," Katie Lang '06 said.
