Community Corner

CL&P: 1,000 Monroe Customers Lost Power Wednesday Night

Scattered outages were reported throughout the state during the day Wednesday as usage increased.

One thousand residents in the Barn Hill Road area lost power to their homes — as well as their air conditioning amid sweltering heat — just after 9 p.m. Wednesday night, until a Connecticut Light & Power crew restored the electricity a few hours later. The outage led to speculation over the cause and Patch had received an email about a car striking a telephone pole.

On Thursday morning, police had no record of the car accident and said it could have been a town over, but Mitch Gross, a CL&P spokesman, had answers on the power outage in the afternoon. He said between 9:15 p.m. and midnight 1,000 customers in the vicinity of Barn Hill Road lost their electricity.

"Something caused the fuse to pop the circuit breaker on the lines," Gross said. "It could have been a tree branch or an animal, but no definitive cause was found."

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On a positive note, Gross said the equipment did what it is designed to do: Shut off the power when it senses a problem.

"Our guys had to investigate the cause, checked the circuit, couldn't find the cause, reset the circuit and restored the power," he explained. "They always have to check the circuit to make sure there's no damage."

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Some people on Facebook wrote that they were without power until 1 a.m., one commenter on Monroe Patch said power wasn't restored until 2, and another reported an outage during the day.

"We had scattered outages throughout the state yesterday as demand increased," Gross said.

Indeed, a heatwave that began on Wednesday caused many in the region to crank up the a/c.


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