By Seth Daniel
Power outages in the Massachusetts Avenue area of the South End on Sunday left about 100 residents without power for a time during bitterly cold temperatures, and more outages are expected in the coming days as well.
Michael Durand of Eversource said the trouble began in the Mass Ave and Shawmut Avenue area when approximately 100 customers lost power around 9 p.m. on Sunday.
“It initially began around on Sunday night with [about 100] customers experiencing partial power,” he said. “This was due to the failure of one of three underground transformers in the area. We did have to disconnect power entirely, though, to connect an emergency generator to our underground system.”
That unfortunate outage during a very cold period of the weekend, when temperatures were bottoming out at around minus-9 degrees, was not the end.
Though it was warmer on Monday, outages hit the same area of the South End again as the backup generator could not handle the power load.
“At 12:30 p.m. Monday, we began working to connect a second generator because one was insufficient to cover the demand for electricity in the area,” said Durand. “This resulted in a second power outage while we did that work.”
This week, he said, crews will remain in that area of the South End to make permanent repairs to the underground system that powers the area. That will require more outages, he said, but they will be planned and customers will be notified before the juice is cut.
“We’ll be notifying the affected customers when we’ve completed that work because it will require a temporary outage to disconnect the generator and restore power using our permanent equipment. We expect that will be sometime later this week…Some of our repair work this week will also involve a temporary power outage in the area. We will be notifying any customers who will be affected by that as well.”