Central Mass. utility gets complaints over long power outages

The latest storm to sock Massachusetts left behind biting cold, sidewalks slick with ice, and a deep current of anger among residents and town officials who were forced to go without power for 11 days.

Some 2,500 residents, mostly in Central Massachusetts, were still without power yesterday, and many were fuming that Unitil Corp., a public utility holding company, had taken so long to restore heat and light to their homes.

"There's clearly a discernible level of anger out there, and everybody is asking the question why," said Greg Barnes, town administrator in Townsend, where 520 residents were without power. "Why is it taking so long?"

George Gantz, a Unitil spokesman, blamed the prolonged outages on a lack of workers, but said power should be restored to virtually all homes and business today.

Barnes was skeptical. "There have been a number of predictions made by Unitil that haven't panned out, so you know the old saying, 'I'll believe it when I see it,' is relevant here," he said.

The Patrick administration, which has received an earful from local officials incensed by the outages, has vowed to investigate Unitil's response. Yesterday, Lieutenant Governor Timothy P. Murray was dispatched to Fitchburg, the epicenter of the outages, to update residents on the response.

Earlier, Murray held a conference call with officials from Unitil and the four communities still without power, which include Ashby and Lunenburg. That followed a conference call with Unitil and local officials that Governor Deval Patrick led Sunday.

"The theme clearly in the phone calls today and yesterday was frustration," Barnes said. "That was definitely the theme throughout, a very high degree of frustration at the local level as to why is this taking so long?"

Asked if he was happy with Unitil's response, Patrick said yesterday: "No, and they know that.

"I appreciate, and frankly share, the frustration of a lot of homeowners and businesses," he told reporters outside his office. But Patrick said it was unlikely the company would be fined. "As a whole, the state and utilities performed very well."

Unitil, which has 28,700 customers in Massachusetts and 14 repair workers and seven trucks, was clearly overwhelmed by the triple blast of storms.

"Crew availability is at a premium when you've got a problem of such a wide scope and scale," Gantz said. "It doesn't make us happy, but that is a fact."

Over the weekend, he said, Unitil was able to borrow about 600 workers from National Grid and utilities in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee. Unitil used as much material - poles, fuses, and wires - as it typically uses in four years, he said.

In Boston, residents' biggest concern wasn't power, but ice, after the weekend's mix of snow and freezing rain had turned into a hard, dangerous shell on sidewalks and streets.

"Terrible, horrible," grumbled 16-year-old Alexandria Mattocks as she tried to navigate from the MBTA's JFK/UMass Station to Sovereign Bank in Dorchester, where she is a shipment worker. "There is no walkway. They didn't clean this up very good."

Dennis Royer, Boston's chief of public works, said the city had dispatched 596 pieces of snow-removal equipment over the weekend and spread 20,000 tons of salt on the roads.

"I think we did reasonably well for the whole weekend, considering the variables that kept coming at us," he said. "We tried very hard to get all the major arterials open and available and pushed back to the curb so that parking would be available so we could minimize the impact to businesses."

During the snow emergency in effect from 9 a.m. Friday to 9 a.m. Saturday, the city towed 329 cars and issued 4,215 parking tickets at $45 each. Royer said he was hoping the rain forecast for tonight and tomorrow, when temperatures are expected to reach 50 degrees, would help melt the persistent coating of ice.

Budgets are also a concern. Mayor Konstantina B. Lukes of Worcester said her city was already in danger of overspending its $2.4 million snow-removal budget, after 400 crews worked overtime to remove 21 inches of snow, dispatching 2,000 tons of sand and 600 tons of salt in the process.

"We're going to have some unusual costs piling up, and that budgetary concern is dangling over our heads," she said.

Barnes, in Townsend, said the state's investigation of Unitil must ensure that the state's power lines and communication systems will hold up when the next winter storm hits.

"We're hoping this nightmare can end soon and then we can . . . start to answer the question, how can this be avoided in the future," he said.

Maria Cramer and Donovan Slack of the Globe Staff contributed to this report.