When The Lights Go Out In The City ...

Yesterday was shaping up to be a second consecutive calm, normal day in the newsroom -- a refreshing break after last week's weather frenzy -- when disaster struck.

I was giving a front page article a second read when, suddenly, the screen went out and the newsroom went dark. It was 7:20 p.m. -- six hours before we go to press -- and the electricity was out. The lights made a few efforts to come back in the minute that followed, but to no avail.

I called our managing editor and the electric company immediately. We could see out the window that it seemed to be a small area that had lost power, and we quickly found out that a transformer had caught fire down the street.

It took until around 9 or so to get a generator going that allowed a few of us to get back to work in the newsroom. It was strange working on a computer in the dark.

We had to send our reporters home to type their stories, as we didn't have enough juice for them to work in the office. They e-mailed them in. As for our Web site, we had two of our employees who were at home update the site as needed from home until we could take care of it from the office.

Overall, it was a strange night. The power came back around 11:45 p.m., just in time to allow the paper to be printed relatively on schedule.

Here's our account of the outage. It was actually quite minor, except for the fact that it hit us, so there wasn't really a lot to report.