Utility taking the heat over outages

Patrick is asking why some residents are still without power 9 days after storm

A dark Christmas light framed an almost empty Main Street on a snowy afternoon in Fitchburg yesterday. (Photos by Mark Wilson/Globe Staff)

FITCHBURG - As thousands of frustrated residents remained in the dark for a ninth day yesterday, officials and lawmakers in north-central Massachusetts lashed out at the region's electric utility and Governor Deval Patrick said he would seek an investigation into why Unitil had still not fully restored power.

The governor is "deeply concerned about the lack of progress," said Kyle Sullivan, spokesman for Patrick, in an e-mail.

"Once power has been restored fully, the governor will ask the Department of Public Utilities to conduct an investigation into why it took Unitil so long to restore power," he said.

Fearing the effect of a storm today that could dump up to 10 inches of heavy, wet snow and possibly wreak more havoc on power lines, lawmakers and municipal officials from the four Massachusetts communities served by Unitil gathered yesterday afternoon at Fitchburg's fire and emergency management headquarters for a news conference.

Representative Stephen L. DiNatale vowed to seek a "full and proper response into the way Unitil handled this crisis," saying he would seek the involvement of the attorney general as well as the governor in an investigation.

The prediction of another wintry blast comes on the heels of the season's first major snowstorm, which dropped half a foot or more across the state Friday evening and into yesterday. Although that brought the usual trappings of a winter storm, including delays and cancellations at Logan International Airport and scattered temporary power outages, the region was spared major headaches.

Many dug out yesterday as snow fell in a continuous dusting of flakes throughout the day, and ventured onto icy, slushy roads to squeeze in holiday shopping, ahead of the start of Hanukkah this evening and Christmas on Thursday.

In the area north of Worcester, however, thousands still had their lives on hold more than a week after the area was pummeled by a Dec. 11-12 ice storm. That storm initially left several hundred thousand Massachusetts residents without power and prompted the governor to declare a state of emergency.

Yesterday, a few thousand customers still had not regained power, mostly in northern Worcester County.

"There was something profoundly wrong with the response to the outage," said Louis Casey, a Fitchburg 50-year-old who has been powering his home with a borrowed generator.

More than 100 people in his community remained in a makeshift shelter at the city's senior center yesterday, anxious to return home.

"We're in day nine and we still have trees sitting on power lines," a frustrated Casey said.

Unitil, which serves about 28,000 customers in the area, initially lost power for all of its local customers; by yesterday afternoon, 4,000 homes and businesses still did not have power.

A company spokesman was optimistic that all but a few hundred of those customers in Fitchburg, Lunenburg, Townsend, and Ashby would regain power within a few days.

But severe weather today could compromise those plans.

According to the National Weather Service, the Boston area and southeastern part of the state will see just a few inches or less of snow today, along with a potential mix of rain and sleet. But communities west of Route 128 can expect 6 to 10 inches of additional snow, with 10 or more inches predicted for some areas west and north of Interstate 495, said Bill Simpson, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Taunton.

It's "a one-two punch," Simpson said, given the previous storm. "It's certainly going to be a powerful event."

At yesterday's news conference, Fitchburg's mayor, Lisa Wong, questioned why larger utilities, such as National Grid, had been able to restore lost power to other areas more quickly than Unitil.

At the same time, she urged residents not to hamper Unitil crews by reacting emotionally to their appearance, citing reports of "accosting" them and conversely of welcoming them with "excessive hugging."

"We need to let them work," she said.

George Gantz, senior vice president for New Hampshire-based Unitil, said the severity of the damage from the ice storm was unprecedented. Instead of a few power lines felled by ice-laden tree limbs in the company's Massachusetts service area, the company had to contend with a dizzying number of broken poles, sheared-off transformers, and damaged fuses, relays, and other components.

Since that storm, the company has used the equivalent of four years' worth of supplies to make repairs, he said.

"It's been, technically, an extraordinarily difficult restoration process," Gantz said. His company ordinarily operates with seven maintenance and line trucks and has some contract crews on call.

For severe storms, it adds crews through a mutual-aid system among utility companies. This past week, Unitil, through mutual aid, employed 75 crews on rotating 16-hour shifts, working around the clock, he said.

With NStar and National Grid contending with their own repairs in Massachusetts, Unitil had to draw mutual aid from as far away as Ohio and Tennessee. Yesterday, about 40 local NStar crews came to Unitil's aid as well, increasing the ranks to 128.

On Bond Street in Fitchburg, Bill Shattuck, 63, and his wife, Jane, finally purchased a generator. The couple put the blame squarely on Unitil.

"The most aggravating thing is Unitil from the beginning has put out essentially no information whatsoever. There were no contingency plans to let people know how long it might be," he said.

But nearby, Ray Bazan has not had the luxury of a generator. He lives just off Bond Street with his elderly mother and spent the last nine days "bundling up."

"We're just trying to keep as warm as we can," he said.

Yet he wasn't angry.

"It's easy to point fingers at everybody, but it's one of those major forces of nature," he said. "Look at what happened in New Orleans, you know. You just deal with it as best you can."

In other parts of the state, residents have endured outages too, but most were of much shorter duration.

Roughly a quarter of National Grid's 1.2 million electricity customers in Massachusetts lost power after the Dec. 11-12 storm, but 99 percent had been restored by this weekend, said Elise Del Barone, a National Grid spokeswoman.

The latest snowstorm caused only short, scattered outages, affecting between one and 100 customers, she said.

NStar, which has 1.1 million customers in the state, managed to avoid prolonged outages from the ice storm, but Friday's snow caused more than 40,000 customers to lose power on Cape Cod and the South Shore, where heavier and wetter precipitation downed power lines.

All but 2,800 of those homes and businesses had been restored by 5 p.m. yesterday, said Caroline Allen, an NStar spokeswoman.

The Massachusetts Highway Department reported only minor spinouts as of yesterday evening.

Adam Hurtubise, spokesman for MassHighway and the Executive Office of Transportation, said the department would pretreat highways today with liquid calcium chloride and place 4,000 pieces of equipment on standby, including snowplows, sanders, and salt spreaders.

The storm here and in other cities prompted delays and cancelations at Logan Airport Friday night, which led to more delays yesterday.

Late Friday, Logan set up cots in the terminals for travelers stranded overnight, said Matthew Brelis, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Port Authority.

"Everyone wants to get to where they're going, especially this time of year, and we try to make the situation for those who couldn't get out and couldn't go home as comfortable as possible," said Brelis.

He recommended that travelers contact their airlines today, with the storm pending, to check the status of flights.

"Everyone looks forward to a white Christmas," he said, "except airline operators."

Speaking of which, Simpson, the meteorologist, said the Boston area should see a white Christmas.

After sunny and cold weather tomorrow and Tuesday, midweek is expected to bring highs in the low 40s and a wintry precipitation mix that could give way to rain Christmas Eve - unlikely to be enough to wash away the snow, however.

In the window between storms, shoppers flocked to Burlington Mall yesterday, causing traffic to back up from the mall entrance to Interstate 95.

"We couldn't come last night because of the snow, and we can't come tomorrow because of the snow," said Marc Emmerich, a Winchester resident who said he had spent an hour hunting for a parking space.

Globe correspondents Matt Collette and Gabrielle Dunn and Megan Woolhouse of the Globe staff contributed to this report.