It was 80 degrees with bright sunshine and light winds on Tuesday, April 14, when suddenly, around 11 am, 2,700 Eversource customers temporarily lost power. The bulk of those who lost power went without it for less than five minutes. The high temperatures and mild wind made the outage unexpected, leaving many Newtowners wondering what happened.

After the substation automatically rerouted power around the equipment failure, 600 customers were without power for about an hour. Those who were without power for an hour were in the South Main Street area, right around the corner from Newtown’s substation.

Newtown Police officers moved to direct traffic at high volume intersections along South Main Street until Department of Public Works workers were able to deploy four way stop signs at those intersections.

While Eversource crews were at the substation on April 14, the exact cause of the outage was unknown when a corporate representative from Eversource contacted The Newtown Bee at 3:25 pm.

The representative explained that when power stations experience an equipment failure or other disruption to service, the system will automatically reroute the power away from the damaged area to isolate the issue as much as possible without causing further damage to the system.

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Reporter Sam Cross can be reached at sam@thebee.com.