Hundreds seek ouster of Unitil after outages

Scores of the hundreds of people who have signed an online petition to oust Unitil have left comments depicting the pain and frustration of being left without power for days in the midst of a New England winter:

"Where do I start? Should I just say I received my Dec bill and am outraged!"

"Tired of paying filet mignon for baloney services!!"

"Good bye, I hope!"

"Get out!!!!"

Some of the comments attest to damage: spoiled food, burst pipes, physical ailments. Some mock Unitil's motto: "We deliver. It's that simple." Many are intensely personal. And one was a rhymed verse from the point of view of unhappy pets. But all want the same thing.

"It's a voice of the people wanting change," said Cathy Clark, a Lunenburg resident who organized the online petition and a more traditional signature drive a week ago. "We want a resourceful, reliable utility provider, and we want fair and reasonable services."

By yesterday evening, the group said it had gathered 2,099 names.

An ice storm that began Dec. 11 wiped out power to all of the roughly 28,000 homes and businesses Unitil serves in Massachusetts, where the New Hampshire-based public-utility holding company covers Fitchburg, Lunenburg, Townsend, and Ashby. One in five of those customers lost power for a week, and more than 1,000 had no electricity for 12 days.

"It's just unconscionable," said Gerard Wilkins, a 60-year-old Lunenburg resident who signed the petition online. "The frustration in this town is like I've never seen."

Multiple residents who signed the petition said they were more upset with Unitil's handling of the outage than with the outage itself. Many said they were led continually to believe that power might come on in a matter of hours and did not take adequate steps to prepare for an extended blackout.

"I understand you can't plan for everything, but you can at least communicate," said Steve Gay, a 51-year-old Ashby resident who signed the petition online. "Managerial-wise, they just did a horrible job communicating to the general public just what they really had."

Wilkins, who is disabled and has received multiple organ transplants, said his health suffered as a direct result of losing power for eight days. The same was true for his wife, who uses a nebulizer and a breathing machine when she sleeps, he said. Their back-up generator gave out after four days, but Wilkins waited two days to replace it after being led to believe his power would return quickly, he said.

In the meantime, Wilkins said, he caught a sinus infection while tinkering with the old generator in the freezing weather, adding that the ensuing coughing fits caused him to rupture a lens in his eye.

"They need to go away; they just need to go away," Wilkins said of Unitil. "We're of a fragile enough nature that we can't take these power outages, and I want a company that I can rely on."

George Gantz, a Unitil executive, called the desire to oust the company "an understandable reaction."

"We certainly know that the customers were very frustrated by the length of time that the restoration took," Gantz, a senior vice president, said in a phone interview yesterday.

Adding insult to injury, thousands of Unitil customers last week began receiving bills for a full month of energy usage, despite extended outages. The bills were based on estimated calculations that will be corrected after the next round of meter readings, Gantz said.

In the coming month, Unitil bills will also carry a letter of apology from the company's CEO, Robert G. Schoenberger, that was posted to Unitil's website on Dec. 31 - after the petition started and after complaints arose about the new bills.

The letter, which does not address those matters, explains that the storm wrought extraordinary damage and created unprecedented demand on the mutual-aid system of line workers shared by all utility companies, leaving Unitil's relatively small crew to wait several days before it could be aided by workers from elsewhere in the state or from other states. On the ninth day, the governor's office also helped make more resources available, Gantz said.

"That's something that we're very grateful for," Gantz said. But "it does lend the impression that National Grid was able to come in with resources that we didn't have available."

Unitil is performing an internal analysis of its response and has hired Robert C. Yardley Jr., former chairman of the Department of Public Utilities, to assist with the review, Gantz said.

Meanwhile, the DPU plans an investigation of its own, prompted by Governor Deval Patrick's request and by concerns from Attorney General Martha Coakley. The investigation will look at all utilities and their responses to the storm, not just Unitil.

The investigation will begin formally this week, with hearings likely to be held in each affected service territory later this month, Lisa Capone, a spokeswoman for the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, said yesterday.

The hearings will help give voice to customers who have long been frustrated by Unitil, according to state Representative Stephen L. DiNatale, who called the ice-storm response "just the proverbial straw."

DiNatale, a Fitchburg resident, said many in the area believe Unitil charges too much while providing inadequate customer service and slow response times, with too-frequent power outages.

DiNatale, who said he would help Clark present her petition to the governor, said he hopes as a lawmaker and a customer that Unitil can be replaced by municipal power companies or by a larger utility, such as National Grid.

If not, he said, Unitil - even with greater scrutiny and new practices - may have a hard time cultivating the trust and respect of its customers.

"Their reputation is so tarnished in this city that I'm not sure they could really ever recover," he said.