Faulty wire creates 4-hour power outage in Square
Published on March 26th, 2008
STONEHAM, MA - An estimated 700 NSTAR customers in the Stoneham Square area lost electricity for a four hour period this Tuesday.
According to NSTAR spokesman Michael Durand, the company first learned about the outage, which was later traced to a faulty wire, at 9 a.m.
“I don’t know exactly what caused it, but usually when something involves a wire, it’s strictly related to the wire itself,” said the NSTAR spokesman.
Service was restored to the entire area by 1 p.m. on Tuesday, according to Durand.
The loss of power reportedly affected a large swath of residents and businesses in the vicinity of Main Street, Central Street, and Franklin Street.
Although there were rumors that crews from the energy provider had trouble locating the source of the electricity failure, Durand claimed that the 370 customers initially impacted by the outage had service restored by 10:30 a.m.
However, because of the nature of the repairs to the faulty wire, located along Main Street, another 330 residences and businesses lost electricity for two-and-a-half hours.
“From 10:30 p.m to 1 p.m., there were about 330 customers effected while we made repairs,” the NSTAR spokesman explained.
“In general, when an outage happens, we have to patrol the lines to determine the cause, although we know the general area [effected],” added Durand, when asked if there was difficulty in locating the source of the trouble. “It strikes me that [the cause] was pretty straight-forward.”
During some electricity failures, NSTAR officials are able to reroute energy to effected areas in order to minimize the impact of the outage while repairs are made.
According to Durand, the energy provider normally implements that temporary fix during power failures that effect a larger population of customers, although the tactic has been employed for smaller outages as well.
However, the spokesman explained that the source of the power failure on Tuesday prevented the electricity provider from relying on that alternative.
“On some occasions, we could make that change, even with the lower numbers [of impacted customers], but on this occasion, we could not,” Durand said.
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