Editors' Note: This is the second article in a multi-part series profiling essential members of the College community who make Dartmouth operate smoothly every day.
Now in his 10th year as manager of the Dartmouth heating plant, Bill Riehl knows every boiler's nut and bolt like the back of his hand.
A native of Long Island, N.Y., Riehl came to Dartmouth in 1995 after managing a trash-burning facility in Connecticut. He leads a group of 15 specialists, 14 of which served in the Navy before working for the College.
"Naturally, they come back to work at a place like this because in the Navy they got lots of experience with steam turbines and boilers," Riehl said.
In an interview with The Dartmouth, Riehl declined to take credit for the work of his obviously tight-knit group of colleagues.
"There are 15 of us in here and we all have our own special skills -- it's such a group of guys," Riehl said. "No one person is making this place run -- we all have our stories, we all have our work experiences."
Terry Blanchard, the dayshift plant operator, has led a life typical of those who work in the plant. A native of the Upper Valley, Blanchard spent 20 years in the Pacific with the Navy as a senior chief boiler technician. He now resides in New Hampshire and holds a position at the plant not unlike his Naval post. Blanchard added that the sense of camaraderie he experienced in the armed services is mirrored in his friendship with the other workers at the plant.
Of the 14 Navy retirees at the plant, none of them had direct wartime experience. Many, however, were deployed into potentially harmful situations. Blanchard's unit, for example, was stationed in the Indian Ocean where it supported Operation Desert Shield, the military stunt which protected Saudi Arabia from Iraqi invasion in 1990.
Most of the workers at the Dartmouth plant grew up in the Upper Valley and are returning to the area after years of military service. Riehl said that unlike other heating facilities, the Dartmouth heating plant is not in danger of being shutdown, offering its employees a sense of job security unavailable to them elsewhere.
"Whereas other plants are working on contract, we're not," Riehl said. "As long as the College continues to need heat, we'll keep working."
Visitors to the plant can quickly sense the fondness among the plant workers. Although very serious about their work, the men are perpetually cracking jokes and are clearly well-informed about each others' pasts. Roughly once a month, the workers have a potluck dinner. Outside of the plant, some of the men go fishing together and often share tools for home repair.
The workers' cohesiveness is essential to the effective operation of the Dartmouth heating plant. Unlike other facilities on campus, the plant never rests. Its four giant boilers burn oil at 600-degrees Celcius 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
The burning oil creates the steam used to heat and cool all the campus's buildings. Afterwards, the steam is run through turbines to produce roughly 45 percent of the campus electricity.
Not only are the heating, cooling and electric services the plant provides essential for the everyday functioning of the College, but any upset in the system could have highly detrimental effects on Dartmouth-based research programs.
"If the power goes out in the Med[ical] School, for example, 10 years of an experiment could go down the drain when they have to keep a room at a certain temperature," Riehl said.
Luckily, there are no recent records of any such disaster. All the same, even though the plant was designed with an emphasis on reliability, it is impossible to prevent entirely against unexpected accidents.
One of the more exciting events at the plant occurred last spring, when a raccoon broke into the substation and jumped between electrical phases. When the heat and electricity suddenly went out, the plant supervisor performed a survey of the plant and found the culprit -- a smoking raccoon -- lying on the floor.
