Mystery Outage

Hyperlocal. Covering local news, the strength of your hometown media.

A week later and still no explanation via Plattsburgh news outlets why the power went out for most of the city on Monday, 11/31/11, at around 1:45 PM.

On Halloween day everything was juiceless for approximately five minutes, especially traffic lights, businesses and factories. In the cosmic scheme of things, a minor incident, but not so minor that it didn’t rate a few words in the daily fishwrap.

Correct me if I’m wrong but there was no mention in the newspaper or other media about what caused the problem. I Googled and searched online, found references to an Oct.19th outage, but nothing about the more recent failure. I asked around if anyone heard anything via the local media or the grapevine. Zero. Zilch. Zippo.

After waiting a week I stopped by the offices of the Plattsburgh Municipal Lighting Department to satisfy my curiosity. The friendly PMLD staff explained that a breaker blew during a line switch. Time to get a new breaker.

I was going to ask if there had been problems lately with breakers or other parts of the system, meaning that other unscheduled outages might occur. But the PMLD people were busy and had other things to do instead of being sidetracked by an inquisitive customer/blogger. Anyway, such questions are the job of “official” media – or so one would assume.

I asked the helpful PMLD staff if the “official” media contacted them or gave out an explanation of what had happened. Zero. Zilch. Zippo.

I had tried calling PMLD first but didn’t feel like playing around with voice mail, leaving a message. Walking over to its office was quicker and easier.

Please note that it’s less than a two minute walk across the street from the back door of the Plattsburgh daily newspaper to the PMLD office. After all, a major power outage is “of interest” to those affected by it.

Hyperlocal, indeed.