Alderman Sean O'Donovan is mad at NStar. - Photo by Andrew Firestone

O’Donovan: Outages more than a nuisance

By Andrew Firestone

After 16 power outages in Ball Square and East Somerville since April, aldermen last week lit into an electrical company they say has treated the city unfairly.

“They aren’t investing the money in their infrastructure that is required to keep the power running in Somerville,” said Alderman-at-Large Bruce Desmond. “I think they are in other communities, I don’t think  they are in Somerville.”

Ward 5 Alderman Sean O’Donovan organized the meeting, one night after he proposed a possible lawsuit against NStar for the string of outages.

NStar media relations official apologized for “obvious inconvenience we have caused to customers both residential and business owners.”

O’Donavan grilled NSTAR officials on their knowledge of both the cause of the outages, and the potential issue of the poor quality switches and circuitry, asking everything from the process of assessing claims from customers, to the increased stress on the grid with added pressure from development projects such as MaxPak. “[Afflicted Somerville residents] think they’re a lot more than ‘nuisances’,” he said of the outages.

Amia Jessa Director of Distribution engineering outlined the plan to replace the electrical system infrastructure, including faulty circuit switches and cables. He claimed  the system should not have failed at this point, and the it must have been corrupted by seepage. Jessa said the outages were not caused by an overload in capacity, but by mechanical failure from within the power grid itself.

“Somerville is not the worst, there are other systems that are ahead on the list,” he said.

Bruce Desmond. ~Photo by Andrew Firestone

Desmond likened NStar’s attitude to an alcoholic in denial. “We’ve got problems here, capacity or otherwise, whatever you want to call it, or don’t want to call it. There are problems here,” he said.

Desmond and O’Donavan demanded a schedule of repairs from NStar as soon as they were available. Jessa said NStar would comply. When asked about how many switches would need to be replaced, Jessa said he had no idea.

Desmond said that newer equipment should have been implemented earlier. “They are just now getting around to scheduling the upgrades only because of the complaints we’ve been putting in. I don’t buy the line they gave us tonight at all. They’ve got a problem with spending money on maintenance and upgrades,” he said.

O’Donovan asked NStar for a full schedule by the next special meeting on September 24.