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A Western Massachusetts town got a shout-out on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” this weekend.
During “Weekend Update" Colin Jost mentioned a news story from this past week about Minnechaug Regional High School in Wilbraham. In August 2021, the school had a failure in its lighting system, resulting in the lights being on 24 hours a day ever since.
The roughly 7,000 lights in the building were installed when it was built in 2012, but on Aug. 24, 2021, the software failed. The system was originally intended to conserve energy by dimming the lights automatically when appropriate, but when it failed, the system defaulted to always being on.
The district immediately reached out to the company but it had changed hands multiple times in the time since the installation. It took weeks for the current company to even find someone familiar with the system, and was able to determine that a simple patch solution would not be possible.
Fixing the system has since been delayed by the pandemic and repeated backorders of the necessary hardware, and the parts are now expected to be delivered and the work done next month.