Vermont phÅ“nix. [volume] (Brattleboro, Vt.) 1834-1955, 1916-06-23

Tree Breaks Down Wires During
Saturday Night Trading
Candles Used for Lighting Stores -
Trouble on Vernon Street Keeps
Lights Out Four Hours.

Trouble on Vernon Street Keeps
Lights Out Four Hours.
Besides plunging everything outdoors
under water for n few weeks the rain
managed Saturday evening at 900
o'clock to plunge everything both in
doors and outdoors in Brattleboro into
inky darkness Saturday evening For
nearly four hours not an electric light
burned in Brattlcboro. The streets were
in gloomy darkness. The prize fighter
who has been knocked out has the slim
satisfaction of seeing stars, but Satur-
day evening when Brattleboro was
knocked out not q star was visible.
The cause of all this was the rain. A
tree on n bank on lower Vernon street
slid down the bank with considerable
earth because of the heavy washing the
earth had been subjected to, and then
fell across the electric transmission
lines of the Connecticut River Power
company. Bingo! Out went every
thing electrical. The big high tension
wires that carry all electric current
from the plant at Vernon to Brattlc.
boro snapped under the weight of the
tree and with one mighty white flash
that lit up the southern sky for an in
slant Brattleboro experienced the last
real light for four hours.
BARRIERS poised their razors over the
half shorn faces of Saturday night Gus
toners and waited patiently for the
lights to flash up again. Clerks in
stores stopped in their tracks and wait
ed. The trolley cars initiated every
thing else and waited, even though
they were on the rails. The housewife
at her sewing, stuck her needle in her
work and rested minute. The drug
gist compromising a prescriptions the
driver of a team; the chef in the
restaurant; the card player; the movie
fan; the physician at the bedside of a
patient, all stopped and waited.
Seconds heightened into minutes and
minutes doubled and tripled and then
the grocery stores which had taken
from their stocks candles seldom in
demand in these times used them as
flickcring advertisements of the art of
illumination and began to do business.
Two elderly women, who had been
stranded on the street, discovered the
lights in one store and CROPPED their
way thither. Each invested in a candle
and began her homcward Journey.
The proprietor of q barbershop
dies. He had shop full of customers
and, what was more important, chairs
full of customers in various stages of
separation from their facial adorn,
mcnts. Securing the candles and the
services of several boys as torch bear
ers the barber and his crew of tonsorial
artists finished, as well as possible be-
tween drips of hot tallow, the jobs of
removing lathcr and whiskers from the
faces of men who do not habitually use
safety razors.
One clothing store had recourse to
lanterns and tried to make the aislcs
in the store resemble the great white
way, but to disinterested observer
from the outside looking in it resem-
bled more a foggy night on
stern and rockbound coast. 1t would
not have been difficult to palm off
raincoat for suit of paiamas in that
glim.
One store proprietor who was for
tunate enough to own an automobile
placed his car on the opposite side of
the street and brought the search
lights i'll range of the front windows,
which was scheme that could not
have been tried back in the days of
the tallow dip.
~'Ob many VI DuSlHcSS ana not
many more private residences are
equipped with gas for Illuminating
purposes, which spoiled a big oppor.
tunity for the Twin State Gas g. Flee
trio company to show a big dividend
for this month and manufactured a
lot of belated Saturday night grouches.
Pocket flash lamps that had not been
used in months were dug out from their
hiding places with the resultant dis.
covere that the batteries had run dry.
Within few minutes from the time
of the break linemen started to locate
the trouble, knowing that it was be-
tween the Vernon plant and Brattle-
boro, but as they started from Vernon
they had the trip to make over nearly
the entire distance before finding the
trouble. 1t was about ] o'clock when
the power was turned on again.