Lady Liberty stood in near total darkness in New York Harbor for some time Tuesday night, and many social media users ventured guesses on what was up
Last Updated Mar 8, 2017 1:53 AM EST
Aside from Lady Liberty’s crown and torch, an EarthCam live stream showed the Statue of Liberty standing in New York Harbor cloaked in darkness.
Twitter users noticed, including CBS News’ Brendan McHugh:
Statue of Liberty is dark. No one’s quite sure why yet pic.twitter.com/HyIMGzTKGh
But then things returned to normal. McHugh tweeted, “Lights are back on folks. Still no reason why they went off in the first place.”
The lights returned shortly before midnight. The outage lasted several hours.
It left tweeters speculating that it might have been done on purpose in light of Wednesday’s “A Day Without Women” protest of inequality.
But National Park Service spokesperson Jerry Willis said in a statement late Tuesday night that, “A portion of the lighting system that illuminates the Statue of Liberty experienced a temporary, unplanned outage tonight. The outage was most likely due to work related to
an ongoing project to activate a new emergency backup generator that is part of our last remaining Hurricane Sandy recovery projects. We will be able to confirm the cause when crews return to the island Wednesday morning.”
