Hanover
“This can all be fixed,” Dartmouth’s assistant director of residential operations said, while investigators from the New Hampshire Fire Marshal’s Office examined debris left by the four-alarm blaze and interviewed students and other witnesses. “Safety and Security did a wonderful job checking all the rooms to make sure nobody was left behind, and the fire departments did a great job to keep it from spreading.
“We were very, very lucky.”
An equally sleep-deprived Hanover Fire Chief Martin McMillan concurred, while pointing to the two intact, four-story wings of dormitories on either side of the tower.
“Without it extending into the other two roofs, we were very fortunate,” McMillan said. “Somebody could have been trapped or hurt.
“There’s some water damage, but keeping the fire and the smoke from getting beyond there, that was a good stop for us.”
Other than sections of drywall falling on two Hanover firefighters — “They were knocked off their feet, but the guys were wearing their helmets and they stayed on the job,” McMillan said — no injuries were reported among the students or fire crews from Hanover, Lebanon, Hartford, Norwich, Enfield, Thetford, Bradford, Windsor, Hartland and Claremont who answered Hanover’s calls for help.
“It was a unique situation with this building,” said McMillan, who previously worked for the fire department in Rochester, N.Y. “I would put this in the top 20 of difficult fires to fight in my time. … The ceilings in that section are very high, which prevented our people from exposing the fire from the interior. To pull that roof apart was so manpower-intensive.”
In a news release later in the day, the fire department added that another complicating factor was “the void-space construction” of the heavy-gauge copper roofing material. McMillan added that once he reached the scene, it became clear that Hanover would need help from its neighbors.
“I can’t say enough good things about the Upper Valley,” he said. “The people we fight fires with are great.”
Before leaving for the day, investigators from the Fire Marshal’s Office declined to speculate on a cause for the fire in the dorm, which Haskell said was built in the 1980s, along with most of the rest of the East Wheelock complex.
Kevin Patterson, a senior living in the adjacent Zimmerman Hall dorm building, said that, on the way back to the dorm complex after hearing the sirens, he learned from a janitor that an electrical problem might have triggered the blaze. Patterson, meanwhile, wondered whether a resident had been cooking on a grill on a flat section of roof to the left of the tower.
“People do that a lot,” Patterson said. “A friend of mine on the first floor said that people go out there all the time.”
McMillan said that, after members of his department left the scene on Saturday afternoon, investigators for the Fire Marshal’s Office were still interviewing witnesses and “following up on some stuff.”
Whatever triggered this fire, McMillan added, the college benefited from the way it goes the extra mile to make sure that warnings go out early, often and loudly when blazes do break out. “They invest heavily in fire safety, consistently updating alarm systems and sprinklers,” McMillan said. “Every semester they invite us in to all the dorms to inspect their facilities.”
Haskell added the college stages regular fire drills at its residence halls, sometimes in the middle of the night.
“This was a teachable moment for all the kids,” Haskell said.
It was a disruptive moment for the more than 300 residents of the East Wheelock complex
Morton’s residents will be starting almost from scratch, just a few weeks after returning from summer break.
“Approximately 70 students who were in Morton will need alternative housing,” Diana Lawrence, Dartmouth’s associate vice president for communications, wrote during an exchange of emails on Saturday. “Dartmouth staff and faculty are working to support the students affected by the fire and have secured alternative housing for them. At the moment, our priorities are to ensure that they are safe, comfortable, and experiencing minimal disruption to their studies and activities.
“We have been touched by the groundswell of support from the student body, alumni, local businesses, and neighbors who have come forward to offer their help,” Lawrence wrote. “It is a reminder of what a strong and caring community we have at Dartmouth and in the Upper Valley.”