Unrelated internet and power outages on Wednesday disrupted town and school functions in New Ipswich and Peterborough.

A hyper-local outage impacting Grove Street in Peterborough left businesses without internet for most of the morning, including the Town House.

According to a Comcast representative, the event was localized solely to the area of Grove Street, and technicians were dispatched immediately to remedy the problem. Comcast representatives were not able to say what had caused the outage on Wednesday afternoon.

The outages affected the ability of the town offices to complete its normal daily tasks.

“I couldn’t do anything,” Deputy Town Clerk Bob Lambert said.

Lambert said he opened the clerk’s office at 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday and the internet had been down from the time he opened until about 11 p.m. Until then, he said, he was unable to do any of the regular tasks of the town clerk, as most of the functions require him to connect to state databases.

“I had to turn people away,” Lambert said. “Basically my office was completely down.”

Lambert said he had to turn away about eight customers and ask them to come back later.

Clarissa Johnson, the Peterborough deputy tax collector, said with the internet down, she would not have been able to process water and tax bills if residents had come in to pay them.

“Luckily, it’s quiet right now,” Johnson said. “If there were bills due, we would have been struggling.”

In a separate event, the power went out for about 45 minutes in downtown New Ipswich, impacting all three of the district’s schools.

Kaitlyn G. Woods, a representative of Eversource, wrote in an email to the Ledger-Transcript that the outage was caused by a failure of a fuse on Highbridge Road, right at the New Ipswich and Greenville town line.

The fuse failed at 9:42 a.m. and Eversource was able to restore power at 10:23 a.m.

“The outage impacted 106 of our customers in that area and we dispatched a troubleshooter to replace the equipment as quickly and safely as possible,” Woods wrote.

After repairing the fuse, Eversource patrolled the line to check for any other issues. The company is still investigating the cause of the failure, Woods said.

The schools were able to stay open and continue with the daily routine with the assistance of generators, Mascenic Regional High School Principal John Barth said.

“We were able to function,” Barth said.

The district made the decision to continue the school day despite limited power as the water and bathrooms still worked and the school’s food service would still have been able to provide lunch to students. Classes that normally take place in interior rooms without enough natural light were moved to brighter areas, he said.

Ashley Saari can be reached at 924-7172 ext. 244 or asaari@ledgertranscript.com. She’s on Twitter @AshleySaariMLT.