<body><div><figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=11YBjv_1Gq8bSq400" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=11YBjv_1Gq8bSq400" width="1200" height="1200" ><figcaption>Illustration by Mar Tachek.</figcaption></figure>An ill-fated squirrel tripped off a line of power supplying heat to Whitman buildings on the evening of Oct. 15, leaving much of campus without heat until the morning of Oct. 20. Whitman’s Facilities Services department sent a campus-wide announcement regarding the incident in Whitman Today on Oct. 16. According to Whitman’s Facilities Services Maintenance Manager Mike Willard, facilities were notified by Whitman security on Oct. 15 about an alarm sounding in the steam plant on Penrose Avenue, which shut down as a result of the power interruption. The following day, facilities sourced new blowers, or controllers, for the boilers at the steam plant. The blowers were installed the following week.Vice President for Communications Gina Zandy Ohnstad said the trouble began at a transformer located near the Facilities Services offices.“On Oct. 15, a transformer across the street from Facilities Services was damaged by a squirrel,” Ohnstad said in an email to The Wire. “The electrical short dropped electricity to the steam plant and burned out the controllers for the boilers. That prevented the college from generating heat from the steam plant for several days.”The outage exposed a weakness in the plant’s newer equipment, which Willard said was installed only last year. Willard explained why the disruption proved so damaging this time around.“The reason this was an issue [was that] at the steam plant last year, we put all new burners and controls in,” Willard said. “The old burners were 37 years old… [and in] a solid state. Power disruptions didn’t bother them too much. The new burners and controls, like everything else, are all electronic. And so when this happened, we didn’t know that this could happen, even.” What was not unfamiliar, Willard noted, was the squirrel’s role in the incident.“It’s not an uncommon thing — actually, squirrels do a lot of damage all over town when it comes to power,” Willard said. “… They’re cute little things to look at, but they can cause a lot of damage.” The steam plant provides heat to roughly 75 % of campus and runs continuously from mid-October until spring, according to Willard. Ohnstad said that the power outage impacted significant portions of campus, although not every building was affected.“The issue affected several academic, administrative and residential buildings across campus,” Ohnstad said in an email to The Wire. Despite this, the perceived impact on campus was relatively low, according to Willard. He explained that season plays an important role in campus heating developments. A heating interruption in the middle of winter, for example, is generally more noticeable than one in mid-October. Ohnstad echoed that point, noting that the weather cooperated during the outage. She added that heat was restored on the morning of Tuesday, Oct. 20.“Luckily the weather was mild during the brief outage,” Ohnstad said. “Everything was back up and running on Tuesday, Oct. 20.”In consideration of disproportionate seasonal impacts and to mitigate future heating malfunctions, facilities contracted Hays Electric to install surge protection on the panels in the steam plant’s boiler house. Hays Electric delivers electrical services to the Walla Walla Valley and is commonly employed by Whitman for repair projects.Willard said the contractor installed the protection on Monday, Oct. 19, the day before the new controllers went in. He expressed confidence that the problem will not recur.“We’re pretty confident that, one, we have the two new controls, and then also, we have protection in place so this can’t happen [again],” Willard said.Ohnstad said Facilities Services does not plan to stop there and is working on more robust protections to prevent a similar outage in the future.For Willard, the incident served as a lesson in how upgrades to campus infrastructure can bring unforeseen vulnerabilities. The steam plant’s older equipment had withstood power disruptions for decades, while its newer electronic replacements proved far more sensitive to them. With surge protection now installed and additional safeguards in development, facilities hopes to prevent a single squirrel from leaving campus in the cold again.</div></body>

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An ill-fated squirrel tripped off a line of power supplying heat to Whitman buildings on the evening of Oct. 15, leaving much of campus without heat until the morning of Oct. 20. Whitman’s Facilities Services department sent a campus-wide announcement regarding the incident in Whitman Today on Oct. 16.

Unlucky Squirrel Interrupts Campus Heating

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An ill-fated squirrel tripped off a line of power supplying heat to Whitman buildings on the evening of Oct. 15, leaving much of campus without heat until 

Unlucky Squirrel Interrupts Campus Heating

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