NStar unplugged?

Electrocuting a dog is no way to win friends.

That's the situation facing NStar Electric & Gas Corp. and its chief executive, Thomas J. May. Last's month's electrocution of Oscar, a Labrador retriever in Charlestown, was followed by a spate of reports about dogs being shocked on city streets from Chinatown to Mission Hill to Roslindale.

As the monopoly power utility serving 1 million homes and businesses across Greater Boston and Eastern Massachusetts, there's no doubt that NStar delivered the electricity that zapped man's best friend. But the utility insists blame rests in every case with contractors who illegally mangled or mishandled underground power lines. Regardless, NStar has vowed to have technicians check 30,000 manholes and surrounding areas across Greater Boston for stray current.

Still, NStar's handling of the issue is drawing some flak. Mark C. Nardone, a vice president and cofounder of PAN Communications in Andover who specializes in corporate crisis PR, criticized NStar as too defensive and inconsistent.

Outside of a full-page ad signed by May in The Boston Globe and Boston Herald last week -- 34 days after Oscar's death, and six days after a Chinatown dog-shocking -- the nine-year CEO has been invisible on the issue.

''It needs to be the CEO's voice that consumers are hearing and reading in the media, and that he's doing everything he can to ensure safety. What I would have done early on is get him out there saying, 'Here's our plan of attack, and we're going to address every public safety problem that's out there,' " Nardone said. (May declined Globe requests for an interview over the past week.)

The utility has also taken a pounding from Mayor Thomas M. Menino. ''The continued failure of NStar to immediately correct these dangerous conditions," Menino wrote NStar's May this month, ''could result in serious injury or death to persons in public ways in Boston at any time."

The dog-zapping fiasco came as Menino has already been feuding with NStar for years, over issues ranging from a 2-day blackout in August 2001 after an Allston power station exploded to recent NStar plans to rip up city streets from Hyde Park to South Boston to build a major transmission line. City and utility officials, however, in the last week have moved from trading blame to cooperating on identifying and fixing problems.

NStar also has to respond to poignant, telegenic stories of dead and wounded dogs and grieving owners with explanations of the finer points of electric infrastructure maintenance and safety laws. Last week's May ads, under the all-capitals headline ''NStar is committed to the safety of Boston streets," sought to stress that NStar is tackling a problem it didn't cause and is pushing for heavier ''Dig Safe" fines on rogue contractors.

Many state laws about electric lines date to the 1880s, and state courts have found that a utility must ''exercise ordinary prudence and care in the maintenance and use of its power line," but liability for an injured dog or person depends on ''the facts of each case."

NStar spokeswoman Christina McKenna said, ''The best PR is strong action, and the public will accept that much more than any showmanship."

Despite his low profile, May has been closely involved in handling the situation, McKenna said, ordering the systemwide inspections, regularly checking up with line managers on progress and problems, and otherwise fully overseeing the utility's response.

From a corporate-image standpoint, being the ''faceless utility" may in fact be preferable right now for NStar. And even bad PR may not matter. Unlike a Johnson & Johnson coping with a poisoned-Tylenol scare or an Exxon cleaning up the Valdez tanker disaster in Alaska, NStar has no rival waiting to take customers upset by the shocked-dog situation. Nothing yet suggests NStar will face any state fines or penalties.

In fact, some PR advisers perceive NStar succeeding. ''It's tricky because you've got all these pictures of hurt dogs on the front page of The Boston Globe, but it comes off that they're making every effort to make it right," said Peter Morrissey of Boston ''reputation management" consultancy Morrissey & Co., who played a key role in managing Johnson & Johnson's 1982 handling of the Tylenol tampering crisis in Chicago, widely considered a model for crisis PR. After seven people died, J&J pulled 31 million bottles of the painkiller from the shelves, took a big role in the FBI probe into who laced pills with cyanide at stores, and put Tylenol back on the market in just six weeks with a new triple-sealed tamper-proof container.

''These things become a crisis if people let them drag on and dig in their heels, but I haven't seen NStar doing that," said Morrissey, an owner of a Jack Russell terrier.

Over the last two weeks, more than 20 NStar technicians working two shifts have checked more than 5,400 NStar manholes and nearby nonelectric manholes and steel plates in Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville streets. Devices called voltage indicators, which look like a long garden watering wand with a white tip, register whether any current is flowing in a manhole cover, chain-link fence, streetlight base, or other potential electric conductor.

Already it has found about 19 examples of electrical leakage from city-owned streetlights and other non-NStar lines, as well as problems with five NStar lines, McKenna said. None are imminent death traps. But McKenna said: ''We are taking all of them very, very seriously."

NStar still has over 24,000 manholes to go. And given the suspected role of melting snow and road salt in conducting stray electricity in earlier incidents this winter, today's forecast of 6 to 12 inches of accumulated snow could trigger new problems.

Peter J. Howe can be reached at howe@globe.com.