The only thing that ever stops these boilers are power outages. He's not afraid of the dark, and even if he were, he would only sit in terror for 10 minutes before the generator out back kicked on. The place used to freak him out, he says. At the far east end of the plant, where rusted rebar and bolts are bared through the crumbling walls they have been holding together since 1911, stubby cement stairs lead to the dark, jagged mouth of a tunnel separated from the plant by a dimly outlined gate. The tunnel runs for miles beneath the campus.
Most traffic comes from trouble-making students, which prompted the gate.
Reimer usually leaves the office light off and window-covers drawn to deter them. Nobody seems to know anything about the heat plant unless they've happened on it by accident, he says. He's kicked out a boy frantic for a place to type his term paper, students ducking out of the rain, bored kids looking for trouble. Reimer admits sometimes the darkness and the rhythm of the machines and the glow of the screen put him to sleep in his chair. It never lasts more than 10 minutes, and anyway, he would wake up if something went wrong.