Connecticut Light and Power’s outage map looks a bit different on Thursday afternoon than it did on Wednesday. The color black indicates that most, if not all, of a city or town is out of power and there is much less black on the latest version of the map.
Part of the reason is that the outage number lower, but that’s not the whole story. The other reason is that the color coding on the map has changed.
The original legend was broken up the highest number of outages into 20-percent increments: black meant 81 percent to 100 percent of the town was out. Today, black means 91 percent to 100 percent of a town is out. So, it’s little surprise there is less black on the map. Any town with an 81 to 90 percent outage now shows up in brown rather than black.
In contrast, two shades of yellow indicate the lowest percentages and the two shades vary slightly. In the old map, yellow meant that less than 1 percent of a town was out. The new map includes a second shade of yellow that indicates that 1 to 10 percent of a town is out.
As of 5 p.m., power is out for 406,000 people, or 32 percent of the company’s customer base.
