Joe and I bought tickets to see a touring production of Hamilton in Jacksonville about a month before Covid got so big that it was called a worldwide pandemic. We live in Orlando, which is about 2.5 hours away.
The show was supposed to happen in March 2020, but it was canceled and then moved around a few times. Each time it was moved, we were given the option to get a refund, but we were happy to just keep the tickets and wait.
In 2021, touring Broadway shows finally got back on the road, and we finally got to be “in the room where it happened” in Jacksonville, 20 months later than we had planned.
It wasn’t the first time we saw the show, but it was just as good as always, and when it was over, we started the long drive home.
We went south on Rt. 95, which runs along the east coast, until we got to I-4, and then we went west. We drove for a while and noticed that many, but not all, of the street lamps on the highway were purple instead of the usual white.
A few months later, we noticed that one of our local mega strip malls, The Loop, also had purple lights. All but two or three of the cars in the parking lot were purple.
We’d been on those roads at night and been to The Loop a million times, and their lights had always been white at night. The purple lights made us wonder what was going on.
Were they some kind of new light that used less energy? Had it been shown that they reduced road rage or made people more aware? Did someone think they were prettier or cooler looking than the old white lights?
Not any of these.
It turns out that they were made wrong by the company.
Yes, for sure.
LEDs are the lights in question. They start out white but start to turn purple over time. The problem is caused by a part of the light that breaks down too soon. That lets too much of the purple light spectrum shine through, making the light purple instead of white (or purplish blue).
So far, the problem has happened in California, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Michigan, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, Virginia, Wisconsin, and possibly other states.
The same thing has happened to our friends in Vancouver and Winnipeg in the Great White North. We’ve heard that purple lights have also been seen in Ireland. All together, there could be tens of thousands, if not more, of lights.
Even more, it has a name. It was called the Great Purpling by Business Insider.
Local energy companies change the lights, but it takes a long time because each light has to be changed one at a time. While Milwaukee said they only had about 300 purple lights to replace, Topeka and Wichita said they had between 2,000 and 3,000.
Joe was driving, and he said that they looked strange at 1:00 in the morning. I thought the purple lights were pretty, to be honest. Too bad they will have to be replaced at some point.
