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Pre-planned blackout in Cambridge

By adamg on Tue, 07/18/2006 - 10:04pm

NSTAR sure knows how to pick the right night to suddenly tell people it's cutting power to some 2,000 homes:

A few minutes ago we received a phone call from City Councilor Denise Simmons. NSTAR informed her that tonight they would shut down power to Area 4, affecting 2000 households with no warning. They claim that 'it's gonna go out anyway' and that they need to make undefined 'repairs'.

If you think this might be a bit on the unacceptable side, there's a community meeting on Thursday at 6:30 p.m. at the Area 4 Youth Center at Harvard and Essex.

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Comments

By Bruce on Tue, 07/18/2006 - 10:49pm.

I suppose they were getting tired of blowing up manholes, electrocuting dogs, and leaking carbon monoxide into people's homes, so they decided to expand their services to include turning off people's air conditioners in the middle of a heat wave.

Very nice.

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By Ron Newman on Tue, 07/18/2006 - 11:57pm.

I'm in Somerville. My Caller ID box shows a call at 12:44 pm from "NSTAR", 1-508-732-4206. Unfortunately they didn't bother to leave a message on my voice mail. I have no idea what to expect now.

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By jon on Wed, 07/19/2006 - 8:24am.

well, not to defend NSTAR across the board (when I lived in JP they were evil cohorts with keyspan) - but I did get two robo-calls yesterday. One informed me that there was heavy load on the system and they'd like me to turn off any extra appliances. The second call came in a bit after 8 pm telling me that they'd be turning off power for "as short a time as possible" between 12 and 3 am to reset the system they said they'd been running on backup power.

Maybe it would have been better if they'd call people who _actually live in_ area 4 instead of confused people like me.

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By hrose on Wed, 07/19/2006 - 9:12am.

I received an automated call during the day from a number in Nebraska (area code 402). The recording said to please reduce usage due to heavy loads on the system.

That same number called again on Tuesday (7/18) evening. Another automated call, this one saying that there would be a pre-planned outage (to transfer some systems from a backup to normal operations) between 0000 and 0300 on 7/19.

We did not lose power. My guess is that it only affected those who had no power on Monday (7/17) night.

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