By David Corriveau
Hanover
The next minute, the 6-foot-1, 315-pound junior and dozens of other undergraduate residents of the Morton Hall dormitory were scrambling for their lives into Saturday’s predawn darkness.
“All of a sudden I heard the fire alarm,” the junior from Louisiana recalled wearily at the scene later Saturday morning, after spending the night at a friend’s dorm following the evacuation of Dartmouth’s East Wheelock House complex. “At first, I figured it was a drill.”
So did sophomore Lucia Caballero, until the college’s safety and security staff started alerting students to wake up and get out, while smoke filled the cathedral-ceilinged entryway in the middle of Morton. Soon, fire crews began arriving from Hanover and, eventually, nine neighboring towns to take on what was growing into a four-alarm blaze.
“I didn’t smell smoke right away,” Caballero said on the way to practice with her cross country teammates in the middle of Saturday morning. “I’ve been in fire drills before, and I thought this one was, too.
“I was pretty annoyed.”
Annoyance quickly gave way to panic and confusion, then an evacuation not only of Morton, where about 70 students lived, but of adjacent Andres, Zimmerman and McCulloch halls at East Wheelock House, home to more than 315 undergraduates in all.
“I was about to go to sleep, and someone told us there was a fire,” said Sam Kater, a senior from Colorado who lives in Zimmerman. “We got out as quick as we could. We gawked at it for about 30 minutes.”
By then, students who hadn’t yet turned in were returning to the complex from celebrating the arrival of the weekend.
“On the way back, I ran into a janitor who said there was a fire at East Wheelock,” said Zimmerman resident Kevin Patterson, a senior. “I said, ‘Oh, s—!: That’s my building, I think.’ ”
While it wasn’t the Zimmerman building, Dartmouth’s safety and security team and the fire department took no chances, emptying all four buildings and checking all rooms for stragglers.
That caution paid dividends around 2:30 Saturday morning.
“They had put out what was burning on the left side of the roof, and we were thinking, ‘It’s over,’ ” Stockman recalled. “Then over on the other side, there were flames coming out and I’m thinking: ‘Oh, OK. This must be serious.’ ”
Stockman wasn’t alone.
“The fire kept popping back up,” Kater said. “I’ve never been this close to a fire before, where there was a cherry-picker up in the air, spraying water …”
“Or where there were firemen with sledgehammers, breaking a big window,” Patterson added, “and guys with saws cutting at the roof.”
Caballero and Stockman said they both stayed with friends elsewhere on campus overnight, while Kater and Patterson bunked in the lounge of a club to which they belong.
Late in the morning and well into the afternoon, Kater, Paterson and other residents of the other three dorm buildings were returning to their rooms, while fans vented smoke-singed air out of the Brace Commons complex that connects the buildings.
No such luck for Caballero, her cross-country teammate Alexa Jennings, Stockman and other Morton residents. They waited well into Saturday afternoon to look for belongings to salvage, while Hanover fire crews cleared out scorched beams and other rubble and investigators from the office of the New Hampshire fire marshal continued sifting through the debris in search of a possible cause.
“We haven’t been in there yet,” Jennings said.
Nor had Stockman.
“I had a lot of stuff,” he said. “Everything I brought to Dartmouth was in there. If it was just smoke that got in my room, it might be OK. If water got on it …”
As if the outcome of the football game didn’t hurt enough.
“It was a rough night,” Stockman concluded.