On Monday, November 20, a power outage left campus in the dark, along with areas in Bloomfield and the north end of Hartford.

Rumors began to spread about how the outage happened–like a tranformer blowing up. According to a spokesperson for Connecticut Light & Power (CL&P)a tree fell on two power lines, which touched and caused a small explosion, which many people thought was the transformer.

The power outage raised some concern about communication between the University and students. But, having no power made it almost impossible for the University to contact students, making it difficult to get the world out to people coming from off campus onto campus. Faculty, staff, and commuter students showed up to campus Monday morning to find classes cancelled. Also, since phones and Internet were down, no e-mails could be sent. CL&P is now working with the University to help the campus restore power rapidly if another power outage were to occur.

The University is working with CL&P on a program now that will provide backup so in the event of something like a power outage happening again, it would have a system to bring things back pretty quickly to bring the entire campus back, not just pieces of it.

CL&P wants to stress that it wasn’t a blackout, but a power outage. Talks about a backup generating system are expected to begin in the Spring of 2007.