UPDATE — 2:55 P.M.: Though power was restored around noon, this morning’s announcement of the power loss at Wilton’s Town Hall immediately raised questions about the extent of the outage across the campus, which also houses the Wilton Police and Fire departments as well as the Wilton Volunteer Ambulance Corps (WVAC). GOOD Morning Wilton reached out to Town Administrator Matt Knickerbocker for more information.
Knickerbocker confirmed the outage affected all buildings on the Town Hall campus, but said there was “limited power” in some areas serviced by other power lines.
He emphasized that the outage did not affect 9-1-1 emergency phone service.
“Those are on a ‘fail-over’ system designed to maintain contact with police, fire and EMS dispatch,” he wrote by email.
Knickerbocker further explained there was no security risk to information or personnel during the outage, despite the failure of internal door-locking control mechanisms.
“There was no security risk. All doors in the town hall campus are now equipped with electronic key-car[d] locks… When a power failure occurs, the key-card system will not operate [and] all doors will remain locked,” he wrote. “However, all doors are equipped with ‘crash bars’ to allow anyone inside the building to exit at any time, even if the electronic locks are not working.”
Knickerbocker reported the facility’s backup generator — which is supposed to automatically start during a power outage — failed to start.
“Town Hall itself does have an emergency backup generator, which is equipped with an automatic transfer switch designed to automatically power up the generator if electricity is lost. The generator did not start, even though the system was tested as recently as this past Saturday afternoon and found to be in good working order. DPW is working to diagnose that problem,” Knickerbocker wrote.
Town officials have often discussed the need to upgrade the aging generator among numerous other repairs and updates that are urgently needed at Town Hall.
BREAKING NEWS — Monday, July 21 at 9:45 A.M.: An Eversource powerline failure has cut all power feeding Wilton’s Town Hall, according to Town Administrator Matt Knickerbocker.
Knickerbocker told GOOD Morning Wilton that all systems are down and Town Hall is closed temporarily. Officials don’t know at the moment when power will be restored.
“All systems are down, including telephones, internal computers, internal door locking mechanisms and internet access, and no business transactions are possible until power is restored,” Knickerbocker wrote in a text message. “An electrical contractor is on site now to address the problem, but at this time we do not have an estimated time for service to resume.”
Knickerbocker said he was informed the issue is “due to a failed Eversource power line that feeds the main circuits at the Town Hall campus.”
GMW will update this story when more information is available.
[Editor’s note: This story was updated to include the timing of power restoration and to clarify that the initial information from Knickerbocker was received by text message, not email as reported in an earlier version of this story.]