A power outage swept Hanover from around 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. today. More than 4,600 people in the region were without power, according to WMUR.
Several professors decided to cancel class and postpone quizzes and midterms, while some dining locations on campus temporarily closed, including Collis Cafe, the Fern Coffee and Tea Bar and Novack Cafe.
Main St. was unusually crowded for the middle of the day on a Monday, as restaurant patrons and owners hung around outside, wondering when electricity would come back on.
Jennifer Packard, the owner of Molly’s Restaurant, stood outside with a couple of her employees. Although the restaurant’s freezers turned off, she said they weren’t worried about groceries going bad.
“Our freezers are so cold that it would take at least a day of no electricity for our freezer to even get to the point where we’re starting to thaw anything,” she said.
Although she wasn’t certain that the power would return, she and her crew hoped to still serve lunch and dinner.
My Brigadiero, on the other hand, started to close for the day. Derek Smith, who runs the coffee bar, estimated that they would all close up shop and go home.
Smith said their team was concerned about the power outage because their freezers store fruit and ice cream.
“We have to make sure that certain fridges are sealed,” he said. “We have a lot of ice cream, a lot of frozen fruit. That stuff melts. You can’t open anything.”
Some services at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center were impacted and appointments had to be canceled, according to WMUR.
Town resident Jane Darrach started walking home from her job at Martha Diebold Real Estate, where the whole team went packed up for the day.
Darrach said she cannot remember another similar wide-spread power outage in town in the 35 years that she has lived here.
“It’s very unusual for the power to go out in Hanover,” she said.
A Town Hall employee declined a request for comment.
Charlotte Hampton is the editor-in-chief of The Dartmouth. She hails from New York, N.Y., and is studying government and philosophy at the College.
She can be reached at editor@thedartmouth.com or on Signal at 9176831832.
