Report: Coping With The Storm

By WBUR Newsroom October 31, 2011

A downed tree on Route 9 in Wellesley (@RyanKellyBoston/Twitter)

This weekend’s surprising early snowstorm has left hundreds of thousands in Massachusetts without electricity. Tell us how you’re coping without electricity, and with downed trees and blocked roads.

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Lydia

These issues are yet more support for why power lines should be installed UNDERground.
Litekeep

The unreasonable-ness of some people astounds me. We received so much snow of such heavy weight. Of course trees and limbs and power lines have come down. We have an aluminum clothes line in the back yard which crumpled due to the weight of the snow and ice! This is a clothes line which normally holds wet clothes, towels, sheets, etc, hundreds of pounds! And it crumpled under the weight of the snow. Sure, we may have avoided some outages if utility companies did more tree maintenance, but regardless, there still would have been power out to thousands of people even if best practices were followed. It amazes me of the stupidity and arrogance of some people about issues like this. It would be nice if everything worked as it was supposed to all the time, but NOTHING works like that!
Tricia Smith

I commend the crews working on the restoration.

NGrid information services, particularly their data management, is poor.

We live in central MA and reported our outage within an hour of losing power, shortly after dusk Saturday evening. I checked our account via the web on Sunday to see if there was any ETR info. Outage was listed. By yesterday AM they’d deleted our outage though we still didn’t have power. That’s certainly one way to better Ngrid’s ETR stats!

I put our outage back in their system via the web around noon yesterday and also phoned when it wasn’t appearing when I went to check its status. Called in to make sure they had it on record. The representative responded to my request by switching me into their Spanish voicemail system.

Despite the fact that the outage makes farm work harder, it’s not the outage that’s got me down. It’s the utility’s poor data handling and information desemination.
Tricia Smith

Ngrid continues games with info. They removed their links to Facebook and Twitter yesterday. Last night they took us off their outage map – we still have no power, though.

They made their phone menus more complicated, so when I went to confirm our outage there were extraneous questions to answer. Just chewing up time. Our ETR is now unknown. They’d been claiming an ETR no later than tonight since Sunday.
Jerelyn266

Although this most recent storm created outages on a massive scale. It clearly demonstrates to me and others that we are as a state, at least, in no way prepared for an even worse disaster.
Lowell, Ma.01852
Mike

Let’s bury the power lines like most of the rest of the advanced industrial world !!
Lizferry

The question to ask about tree trimming and the electric companies is how many hours this year v. last year, not the difference in money spent.