Without power

By adamg on Wed, 08/31/2011 - 9:08am

The state reports that as of 6:30 a.m., nearly 140,000 Massachusetts customers remain without electricity - NStar 36,000 (about 850 in Boston) and National Grid 103,643.

NStar town-by-town numbers | National Grid map.

The Globe follows an NStar crew for a day and talks to National Grid about why Gillette Stadium got power before the rest of Foxboro.

Around 7 this morning, Andrea Courtois, who lives near the Rhode Island line but works in Brighton, tweeted:

Just saw a convoy of utility trucks heading S on 95. It pretty much brought tears to my eyes.

In Scituate, Art Beecher reports:

Day 4 w/o power: Have begun harboring deep resentment for these show-offs with their fancy "lights," "refrigeration," and "hot water."

Neighborhoods:

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Comments

Help from West of Worcester

By SwirlyGrrl on Wed, 08/31/2011 - 9:36am.

And south of the Mason/Dixon.

Picking my way home from work Monday over tree trunks and around fallen branches, I spotted tree crews from Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Illinois.

Friends on another street, without power for two days due to a massive tree's demise, received help from an Arkansas tree crew and linemen from Alabama (both crews received a free lunch from the neighborhood).

So, if you see people fixing stuff in your neighborhood, consider feeding them and bringing them coffee. Many are very far from home and all are working mind-numbing shifts with few breaks trying to clean up this mess for us all.

From the suburbs of Worcester

By RoasterBoy on Wed, 08/31/2011 - 12:09pm.

During the ice storm, the Holden Municipal Light Department was seriously criticized for its slow repairs. (Our family was without power for eight days.) We thought that it was because a municipal light department couldn't command the resources needed for such a large operation. Unitil in northern Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire fared much worse in the field and in the press.
Big companies such as National Grid, we reasoned, knew how to handle these things because they were always doing something like this somewhere.
This time, it's the big guys who've been outclassed by a storm. Given the amount of notice for Irene, it's surprising that National Grid appears to have been so unprepared. I suspect that the follow-up hearings will show us how much pre-positioning they'd done to have crews and equipment ready by Friday or Saturday.

NStar link broken

By RoasterBoy on Wed, 08/31/2011 - 12:02pm.

The link to the NStar town-by-town report (http://nstar.com/residential/outage_towns.pdf) is going to the Page not found page.

Link fixed

By adamg on Wed, 08/31/2011 - 12:13pm.

They switched from a generic file name to a date-based one.