On Thursday afternoon, Connecticut Light and Power took their outage map offline for approximately 30 minutes. When it came back online, much of it looked to be the same. Most probably figured the map had an issue that needed to be repaired. But to those who looked closely, the color scale had changed.

CL&P Tweet

CL&P issued a tweet shortly thereafter to say the map had come back online – and that more detail had been incorporated into the map’s color scale.

CL&P Tweet

But was it wise to change the color scale on the power outage map during this major disaster? This change is confusing. It added more colors to an already cluttered map. I know, you could’ve simply looked at the table of outage numbers and seen that little had changed in the 30 minute time span – literally. But, most of the blacks, indicative of towns that had 81%-100% of customers without power, disappeared. Now, only towns meeting a stricter criteria are shaded with black. Your town must have 91%-100% of customers without power to be shaded black. This wiped most of the black off of the map. Good, right? Well, it gives a false impression to those who constantly check the map for progress without looking at the actual numbers or scale each time they visit the site.

Perhaps it would have been wise to add more detail before the storm hit.