Some of the workers have a long history with the plant. Watch engineer Jack Neville, an employee for 31 years, practically grew up there. His father, the late Thomas D. Neville, started working at Central Power in 1945, when Yale still ran on coal. Jack Neville remembers, as a boy in 1965, riding with his father to the plant after a massive blackout had plunged the entire Northeast into darkness. Yale remained an island of light in an ocean of night. “That was something to see,” he says.

Photograph by David Ottenstein '82