Most of the time our problems with electricity arise when the lights can't be turned on.
But nobody ever imagines that you won't be able to turn them off:
For nearly a year and a half, a Massachusetts high school has been lit up around the clock because the district can't turn off the roughly 7,000 lights in the sprawling building.
The lighting system was installed at Minnechaug Regional High School when it was built over a decade ago and was intended to save money and energy. But ever since the software that runs it failed on Aug. 24, 2021, the lights in the Springfield suburbs school have been on continuously, costing taxpayers a small fortune.
This software system was designed to "save money and energy," and now it's wasting sky-high amounts of both, indefinitely??
Am I reading that right??
It's hard to imagine a more delightfully ironic confluence of high technology and low results:
"We are very much aware this is costing taxpayers a significant amount of money," Aaron Osborne, the assistant superintendent of finance at the Hampden-Wilbraham Regional School District, told NBC News. "And we have been doing everything we can to get this problem solved."
Right. In the old days you simply solved the problem by turning the lights off. Flicking a switch. Turning a knob. It was all so elegantly simple. It worked so well.
And now they're reduced to doing this:
That, in part, is because the high school uses highly efficient fluorescent and LED bulbs, he said. And, when possible, teachers have manually removed bulbs from fixtures in classrooms while staffers have shut off breakers not connected to the main system to douse some of the exterior lights.
Eventually, they're going to get desperate enough that the resource officer is going to just start shooting the lights out.
Don't worry though: Help is arriving in the nick of time:
But there's hope on the horizon that the lights at Minnechaug will soon be dimmed.
Paul Mustone, president of the Reflex Lighting Group, said the parts they need to replace the system at the school have finally arrived from the factory in China and they expect to do the installation over the February break.
