The blackout began around 11 p.m., and lasted for about an hour. Lady Liberty's official Twitter account tweeted: "Some lights on the Statue were temporarily off tonight. Likely related to new emergency generator/Hurricane Sandy recovery project work." The tweet came at midnight, at around the time the lights went back on.
Hurricane Sandy, which hit in October 2012, submerged most of Liberty Island, damaging every building except for the statue itself. The damage was extensive, closing America's most iconic landmark to the public for nine months. Repair efforts continue to this day.
National Park Service spokesman Jerry Willis said in a Tuesday night statement, "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."
Immediately, supporters of the Day Without A Woman movement offered that the blackout was done in support of their policies. The movement, organized by the same group that planned and executed the enormous Women's March on Washington in January, encourages women to take Wednesday off work, wear red, and avoid spending money at businesses owned by white men in support of gender equality in the US and around the world.
There is absolutely no evidence that the blackout was a planned act. It didn't even occur on the same day as the protests.
But never let the truth get in the way of a good story, especially on Twitter. As The Social Amplification of Risk, a 2003 book of essays by a team of sociologists, put it, "…Technological failures and crashes may become collectively viewed through a single, over-arching concept that provides a convenient explanatory mechanism for why such failures occur."
Or in other words, people will make things up to make random events like an accidental blackout coincide with a narrative that just so happens to agree with their worldview.
