Newtown Copes And Recovers Slowly––

The Day The Lights Went Out

By Andrew Gorosko

and Dottie Evans

When electrical service failed on the hot, humid afternoon of Thursday, August 14, Newtown residents, like residents of thousands of other communities across the Northeast and Midwest, quickly realized how dependent modern life has become on electricity.

Although it is invisible, electricity is ubiquitous, powering all manner of modern devices. When there is a power outage, those devices simply stop working. Refrigerators don’t refrigerate. Electric lights don’t illuminate. Computers don’t compute. And in one unusual turn of events, electric door locks at The Homesteads assisted living facility in Hawleyville failed to operate, allowing an elderly woman residing at the facility to disappear into the woods for several hours. (See separate story.)

When the power failed shortly after 4 pm in Newtown, all the traffic signals at heavily traveled intersections simply stopped working, leaving it to motorists to navigate those perilous paths unassisted by modern controls. About a dozen major local intersections are controlled by traffic signals.

Lieutenant James Mooney said this week police called in extra officers just to direct traffic at the major intersections. Traffic structures and portable stop signs were posted at some intersections to help drivers safely move through those congested areas, he said. Police had about a dozen officers on duty during the outage.

Town road department workers and the police coordinated how best to manage traffic flow during the unusual circumstances, the lieutenant said. The outage occurred at the start of the evening rush period.

Police fielded many telephone calls from residents seeking information about the outage and when power would be restored, making for a very heavy call volume in the emergency dispatch center, Lt Mooney said.

“Overall, people handled it very well,” Lt Mooney said.

The police station, which houses the dispatch center, operated on emergency generator power during the electrical outage. A new 80,000-watt generator was installed there in the spring of 2002 to replace a balky old generator, as part of a Town Hall South renovation project. 

When power eventually did return, it did so at differing times in different parts of town. Power returned to most areas at about 1 am on Friday, August 15, though some isolated pockets were still without power well into the weekend.

On Monday morning, three days later, police were still having trouble resetting the traffic lights on Church Hill Road.

The Big Y on Monday was still very low on bottled water, and customers said that on Friday, after Thursday night’s blackout, there was absolutely no water of any kind on the shelves –– the store was totally sold out. There were also no batteries. Another person reported finding no celery, though it is not clear whether that outage was related to the Great Northeast Power Grid Failure.

Vice President of Operations David Brunelle, speaking out of the Big Y’s Springfield, Mass., headquarters, reported that “although we were a little panicky for awhile, when we didn’t know how long this thing would last, we ended up being fortunate. Newtown’s power was mostly back around ten-ish,” Mr Brunelle said.

He reported that the company had shipped in 2,000 pounds of dry ice to pack into the store’s coolers and refrigerated cases, and they kept the doors closed to keep the frozen perishables from spoiling.

“Obviously, nobody was buying refrigerated foods at that time anyway, because there was no way to cook it with no power. Or it was going to melt the moment they left the store.”

“The dry ice comes from our suppliers in Enfield,” Mr Brunelle said, adding that similar precautions were taken at each one of the 20 Big Y stores in Connecticut.

“Dry ice holds the food pretty well,” he added.

When the power outage was over, Big Y employees went around with gloves and removed the dry ice. Over the next day, Mr Brunelle said, “it pretty much evaporated into thin air.”

“We also had a run on batteries and ice cubes,” he added.

 The Queen Street cleaners in the Big Y shopping center found the power outage Thursday evening to be quite perplexing. While they were able to receive orders for cleaning, they could not retrieve finished cleaning for their customers because the conveyor belts weren’t moving. And of course, they couldn’t use the computers for billing.

Town Hall managed to come back to near normal on Friday because its generator kicked in, but “not everything was working,” said Sue Schpunt at the town clerk’s office.

Tom Johnson, owner of Lexington Gardens, said that his biggest problem was not knowing, at first, how long the outage would last.

“We were worried with the size of the blackout and I realized it might be more extensive than a few hours. Our generators are not hooked up to our flower coolers so this would be a problem.”

Lexington Gardens was scheduled to deliver a large number of fresh flowers for both a wedding and a funeral on Saturday, and a power outage Thursday looked like very bad news.

“We decided to had to get all the ice we could find and pack the cooler. A few of us ran out to the local liquor stores and bought out all the ice we could find. We took all they had,” Mr Johnson said.

Luckily, by 10:18 pm Thursday, the power was on again. But it could have been much worse.

“Now I’m getting my generator hooked up to my cooler in the florist shop –– just in case,” Mr Johnson said.

Newtown Schools Board of Education Chairman Elaine McClure said Tuesday night that she and her family are still not out of the woods, powerwise.

“Right now, we’re having our third outage in less than a week and it’s getting a little old,” Ms McClure said as she exited the Pizza Palace Restaurant on Church Hill Road.

She and several other Ashford Lane residents were suffering from a faulty power line transformer, which had not only failed in the widespread outage and during weekend lightning storms, but had also become somehow clogged with several gallons of oil.

“So they turned everything off and now we’re waiting for the HazMat [hazardous materials] trucks to come in. Then if they find oil in the soil nearby, that will have to be removed too. Then we’re really in trouble,” she added.