Power has been restored to nearly all of the 3,700+ Southborough homes and businesses that went dark during last weekend’s autumn snowfall, but for some the wait continues.
Yesterday National Grid was able to turn the power back on for 123 homes on Skylar Drive, Fairview Drive, Summit Road, and a few other streets in the Parkerville Road south neighborhood. As of this morning, that leaves 26 customers in Southborough still waiting for power.
According to the National Grid website, the largest remaining outage affects nine customers on Southville Road. Another outage on Marlboro Road has seven without power. The remaining outages are scattered throughout town and impact less than five customers each.
National Grid estimates power will be fully restored in Southborough by tonight at 11:45 pm.
Just thinking. Is paying for linemen from other States, considering their time, travel, hotels and gasoline, not to mention closed businesses here, schools, restaurants, residents without power causing dangerous situations with generators, dangerous downed wires, massive trees cleanups worth the savings to NGRID by not keeping up with overgrown trees on wires? I believe I heard the company blames the residents for not allowing them to cut overgrown branches. Is this the new status quo? What is the law on overhanging branches? Who is responsible?
Ruth, I am not sure what the law is on overhanging branches but as far as the vines that grow up the wires and then blow the transformers (the wires usually have a yellow plastic piece covering them) if you (homeowner) do not cut the vine back then you will keep having a blown transformer. We learned the hard way. ME: “Hello, Hi! This is Carrie Alpert etc. etc. we have a vine and overgrowth problem and that is why the transformer keeps blowing” NATIONAL GRID: “Yes, that is evident, you will have to take that up with the town as we are not allowed to do any trimming as it is all protected”. Really what I think is that no one wants ownership per usual.
That explains a lot about why Southborough has been so hard-hit by the storms! How about some logical thing here…we need to give them approval to trim! Here I was thinking that National Grid was idiotic or cheap for not doing the proper maintenance. No, apparently that is self-inflicted Southborough! Who’s in charge of that decision? There is enough room just a bit further from the power lines for trees, and those vines are no good anywhere.
Time for some hearings ASAP. Then get out the chain saws and trimmers. I can’t live like this.
The sweetest sound in Southborough right now is that of a chainsaw.
Understandable that we had an Irene issue with no power (which also caused my home and many others basement to be flooded) shouldn’t National Grid be responsible and have a stronger contingency plan for a weather condition when it was known (and even in preparation for winter!) to be expecting power outages?Wonder what their Service level agreements are! My neighbor saw the downed tree on Saturday night (when we lost power) and we didn’t see one crew member from National Grid there until Monday! That is outrageous – thankfully we had relatively warm days ( atleast day time) what if it were the dead of winter?What about the seniors and kids who need help? Maybe it’s time to consider allowing competitor energy companies to serve in our town or even having a municipal one, who know and serve locally better- then automatically service level will go up and avoid such situations which seem to be becoming the norm! Right now its like we have no choice, but to be stuck!
All I know is, we have no tree or vine problems here, but we lost two refrigerators full of food. And now we know better than to buy food like we used to.in the good old days. We have a freezer, too ,that has to be emptied. If I shop today, will I have to throw the food out next week? Or just keep enough food for a couple of days in the fridge. When I was a kid and through my life, including the blizzard of 78, the no name storm, all the hurricanes, did we lose power. Losing power seems to be the status quo lately, among so many other problems we haven’t seen since the depression.