From high atop my building’s roof on Saturday night, Halifax was not all that dark. From 8:30pm to 9:30pm there should have been drastically less lights on. I expected to go up there and see the city dim all at once, but I was wrong. So I came back inside, turned on some lights and watched TV. It was there that I saw a reporter who was in Sackville, where residents had gotten Earth Hour completely backwards, turning on as many lights as possible. “I thought we were celebrating the earth by lighting it up when it’s usually dark” said an unidentified woman. “I saw that the moon was only a sliver and assumed that since it wasn’t lighting us up, that we were supposed to” exclaimed a nearby man. How did Sackville get it so wrong?
Apparently, during the weeks prior to the Saturday event there were posters put up all around Sackville, explaining what was to be done during Earth Hour. Without any contact info, it’s difficult to say who was responsible for the posters. Word quickly spread and soon the whole town was under the impression they were to turn on more lights than usual. Satellite photos from that evening show an especially bright spot amidst relatively darker surrounding areas. ‘We thought we had flown off course” said a local airline pilot, about the confusion caused by the brighter-than-usual Sackville.