An underground cable failure near Hanover High School Sunday that contributed to two local power outages over the last two days has proven irksome to students living both on and off campus.
The first outage started at 8:45 p.m., Sunday and affected 1,900 customers, according to Granite State Electric spokeswoman Jackie Barry. The College's electricity, though, was not affected. Still, many students living in local off-campus housing, were without power for the remainder of the night.
The problem was solved by 3 a.m. Monday, after reconfiguring the power routing in Hanover around the failure and then switching back to the original configuration, Granite State Electric had a shorter but more widespread failure. At 1:50 p.m. Monday, power went out to 2,600 customers, including the College. The majority of College buildings went dark for 25 minutes until power was restored.
Of the 15 power feeders that supply electricity to parts of the campus, only three remained functioning due to the College's own heating plant, Bill Riehl of Facilities, Operations and Management said. Buildings on Main Street were some of the fortunate ones, including Robinson and Collis. The rest of campus had to wait for Granite State Electric to come back online.
Though the College-owned steam power plant does have the capacity to step up its production in an emergency, Riehl said they would almost never choose to do so.
"Under certain circumstances the potential does exist to increase the load on the generator, but that would risk losing power to everything," Riehl said.
Monday's outages disrupted classes in the 2 p.m. timeslot, but most students -- particularly those living off campus -- complained more about Sunday night's blackout.
"I had planned a huge fish sticks and chips dinner for my roommates that completely fell through," said Pat Jones '06, who lives at 31.5 South Park Street.
But not all bad came out of the loss of power. Jones took the opportunity to help out his neighbors.
"The retirement home across the street lost power and Jesse Blom '06 and I had to help a nice old lady named Carol find her flashlight and call 9-1-1 to report the power outage," Jones said.
Libby Hadzima '06 said that she was irritated by the outage when studying in Rauner Library Monday afternoon -- but not enough to leave.
"When the power went out all the security doors started clicking and there was this constant weird beeper the whole time the power was off," Hadzima said.
"It was annoying, but I was too lazy to move."
