Residents Speak Out Over National Grid's Handling of Hurricane Irene

State and local officials are fed up with the handling of power outages after Hurricane Irene went before the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities Thursday night to share their disgust with the handling of and the

One by one residents and officials were sworn and shared their complaints of National Grid's handling of Irene during a public hearing held at

The storms, occurring just a couple of months apart left many area residents without electrical power for up to a week or more.

The small auditorium took on a courtroom feel, as each speaker was sworn in and all proceedings were recorded by an independently hired courtroom stenographer.  

National Grid Massachusetts President Marcy Reed was first to take the podium and read from a prepared statement: "Irene was forecasted to affect most of the eastern seaboard and ultimately caused widespread destruction from the Carolinas to New England. As a result of Irene, over six million electric customers in 11 states were left without power. This is why it was so difficult to obtain the number of outside crews we needed, since many other utilities form Florida to Maine needed to keep their own crews in place to restore power locally.  We had to call for crews from as far away as Texas, Colorado, Michigan, Wisonsin and Canada," Reed said.

It was the issues of preventive tree-trimming, lack of communication and the extended duration of the outages that proved to be a recurring theme from those who addressed the DPU.  Attleboro City Councilor Walter Thibodeau, who served on the Mass Electric Consumer Advisory Council from 2002 until that council was dissolved in 2006, felt that the widespread outages may have been avoided if better attention had been paid to proper line, pole and transformer maintenance.

"Some medical customers who had put in requests for generators waited up to six months to receive this free preventive service," Thibodeau said.  The councilor also referenced this month's National Grid bill insert sheet titled "Preparing for Winter's Worst", with one suggestion being that customers purchase a camp stove for cooking. "I wonder if the NFPA (National Fire Prevention Association) was consulted on this?" Thibodeau asked. "I doubt it as all local fire departments would never suggest such a solution due to the temptation of using the stove as a replacement for heating the residence resulting in death by carbon monoxide poisonining."

Foxboro selectman Jim DeVellis said that the Town of Foxboro has filed a formal petition with the DPU to investigate National Grid's lack of response to Irene. "Much of Foxboro was without power from August 28 to September 3," DeVellis said. "We want to impose substantial penalties on National Grid for failure to trim trees and failure to communicate. Customers should not have to pay for National Grid's deficiencies."

Attleboro City Councilor Frank Cook said that he's still seeing a lot of branches hanging over wires. "With winter on the way I see history repeating itself," Cook said. "I've also noticed the streets looking a lot darker with many street lights out. Are there any plans to restore these lights in the near future?"