When the first round of alarms went off at about 9:30 on Tuesday night at Robie Andrews Hall in Gorham, nobody was exactly sure about the cause. There had been a potentially toxic chemical spill in the basement, and all 200 residents had to be temporarily evacuated. But it would take authorities some time to identify just what had spilled and how bad the damage might be, while three students and a responding officer were rushed to the hospital as a precautionary measure.
Pat Donahue recalls smelling some fumes from his room on the first floor, just before everybody was forced out. He eventually decided to crash at a friend’s dorm in another hall.
Other residents, like Josh Holland, stuck around to soak up the surreal atmosphere: cleanup crews walking around in bulky hazard suits under blinding floodlights, periodically hosing one another down.
As residents remained behind police lines and TV news crews arrived on the scene, rumors naturally swirled. By Thursday, Public Affairs director Bob Caswell was already a bit tired of diffusing a persistent item that had tens of gallons of pure silver nitrate flooding the basement.
It turned out to have been a small container of heavily-diluted silver nitrate, a chemical compound used in developing film that is indeed toxic, but typically short of life threatening. It can cause third-degree burns if left untreated. Some students working in the photo lab that night had noticed it seeping out of its container, and immediately called authorities. Nobody was harmed in the incident.
People were invited to return to their rooms at about 12:30 a.m., before another round of alarms were mysteriously triggered about a half-hour later. Cleanup crews finished their work by 3 a.m., and students were excused for sleeping in the next morning. Their families could also be forgiven for being shocked by newspaper accounts the next day, which spread the notion that a 20-gallon barrel of poision had been leaking through the dormitory the previous night.
Robie Andrews Hall is no stranger to hyperbole. There are persistent reports that its dorms have been haunted by the spirit of a young schoolgirl since the early 1900s. No word yet if supernatural forces were involved in the chemical spill.