Time for Somerville to sue NStar?
By adamg - 9/8/10 - 2:52 pm
Ward 5 Online reports Alderman Sean O'Donovan is so fed up with power outages in Somerville that he's thinking lawsuit. In the meantime, the Board of Aldermen's Public Utilities and Public Works Committee will discuss NStar performance at a meeting tonight, starting at 7 p.m. at City Hall.
Comments
This meeting is incredible
This meeting is incredible important as it involves businesses and residents alike. If these power outages have jeopardized your life, in any way, please attend tonight's meeting and let your voice be heard!
Details are...
Committee on Public Utilities and Public Works
7pm
Aldermanic Chambers/City Hall/93 Highland Avenue
I would like to thank Adam for posting this!
~Courtney O'Keefe
Creator of Ward5Online.Com
A lot of people don't realize
A lot of people don't realize they can submit complaints to the DPU. Once they start getting a flood of complaints, you bet they'll crack down on NSTAR ( & National Grid, etc) to get things moving in the right direction.
http://bit.ly/bmnxN9 <-- link to the DPU's consumer complaint page (for utilities)
DPU doesn't care.
Last year I moved into a new apartment and phoned NStar to establish service. They goofed something up and canceled my order to establish. Without any warning they cut my power on a Friday afternoon and refused to restore service until the following Monday. I filed a complaint with the DPU and nothing came of it.
NStar sucking...
EDIT: I forgot that we're National Grid up here. Either way, the behavior seems familiar enough to excuse mixing up their names. Also, NStar's service in JP when I was living there spawned the infamous "Power to the People" outage reports in the JP Gazette..
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NStar isn't exactly playing by the book, "How to Win Friends and Influence People." I think a lot of cities and towns have been frustrated, whether it's outages or street lights they're supposed to service, or whatever it is they're doing or not doing..
NStarNational Grid sent a guy to Lynn City Council last night who was not prepared to answer any of the obvious questions about a variety of recent and long-standing complaints. I'm not even sure why he was there. Why couldn't Natl. Grid send a person who knows what the hell Natl. Grid is doing, or at least arm this guy with the necessary info to do his job!? Institutional incompetence, I suppose.I'm sure there will be plenty
I'm sure there will be plenty of similar "I don't have that information" and "I'll have to get back to you on that" answers in Somerville, too.
Face it, the infrastructure is old, and it cost a lot of money to fix, and the utilities don't want to fix anything unless they really have to, and by then it will cost even more. I'm sure all the rain we got this year flooded areas forcing some fixes. Did anyone else see the horrible condition of the transformers NSTAR took out of the ground by Redbones? I wonder how much of the city's grid looks like that?
Squirrels don't help, either.
Utility wires that run underground supposedly
don't get wet or develop problems as readily as utility wires that go above ground do, but, when underground wires and transformers do get wet and cause a power outage, it's a hell of a lot more difficult to pinpoint and fix the problem. I can imagine the horrible condition of the transformers that were removed and had to be replaced. Maybe if enough cities and towns here in the Commonwealth do file lawsuits against NSTAR, they'll clean up their act. One can only hope.........