Overview
- Overnight storms blew an unusually large American flag into a high-voltage transmission structure in Stamford, creating an initial outage that affected about 5,000 customers and saw roughly 3,000 restored within 20 minutes by remote switching.
- While crews prepared to remove the flag on Sunday afternoon, a gust shifted the material into a second circuit and triggered a much larger outage that ultimately affected more than 40,000 Eversource customers.
- Eversource reported that 28,097 Greenwich customers lost power—about 98.9% of the town’s served customers—and said remaining impacted customers were restored by about 5 a.m. Sunday after crews removed the flag.
- The outage knocked out numerous traffic signals, forcing police to direct intersections and disrupting businesses that lost refrigeration and electronic payment ability during the blackout.
- Transmission-level faults affect far larger service areas than distribution-line failures because crews must perform safety checks and staged re-energizing, a process that highlights how unusual debris can create broad public-safety and economic impacts.