A third of the southern wing of my network is down tonight. From the pattern of the outage notification I got from NMS it looks like another power failure in the Wethersfield Ave. feeder. This, I have been told, is an old and creaky cable. When it gets cold -- or very hot -- loads go up and the cable tends to break. This happens at least a couple of times a season. It also happens in the lower Albay Ave area and North Main St.

I'll tell you this. If I were a ratepayer in Hartford, I'd be bloody pissed about the crappy infrastructure Connecticut Light & Power seems to think is acceptable. We were having problems like this in downtown Glastonbury about a decade ago. The businessmen and residents banded together and gave CL&P hell until they put in a new feeder. The same thing happened in Simsbury in the '90s as well.

Let's see, organized suburban white people get new, up-rated electric service. Brown and black people get to shiver in cold, dark buildings. You do the math.