On power outages, residents harnessing their outrage.
By Jack Encarnacao, Globe Correspondent | April 24, 2005

Peter Snoad called it ''par for the course these days" on Dunster Road in Jamaica Plain. His electricity was out again.

He knew it would happen. NStar had posted advisories around the neighborhood warning of an outage between 11 p.m. on Friday, March 18, and 1 a.m. Saturday morning, March 19. Snoad said his power, which went out as predicted at 11 p.m., wasn't restored until about 11 a.m. Saturday.

So, with little else to do in a powerless home at 7 a.m. Saturday, he walked around the corner to his office to run off copies of his flier promoting a March 31 neighborhood meeting with NStar representatives.

Jamaica Plain has endured a string of outages for the past five years, and many of its residents are finding ways to get answers. Some painstakingly study electric company facts, figures, and how underground equipment is updated. These residents keep statistics. They demand meetings. One resident even has the NStar president's phone number on speed dial.

''We're really going through Electricity 101 here," said Ralph Loring of Dunster Road.

Last month, in preparation for their meeting with NStar, residents pored through local newspaper clippings and recorded some 80 blackouts since July 2003 in JP alone. NStar says it does not categorize outages by neighborhood or keep any such statistics, so the residents compiled their own numbers. Some marked sheets of paper they left scattered around their homes whenever the power went out. Others combed through three years of Jamaica Plain Gazettes and its biweekly ''Power to the People" column listing outages reported to the paper. Others tried to pin down just how the entire power system worked, from pricing to maintenance to infrastructure.

The residents estimate that in the past two years, their 80 outages averaged 3.3 hours in duration. One outage, beginning on Aug. 16, 2003, lasted 35 hours. Of those outages, NStar told the Gazette that 35 percent were caused by circuit problems, such as underground cable faults and blown transformers; 15 percent were outages NStar planned; and 4 percent were the result of trees falling or cars hitting utility poles. The cause of the remaining 46 percent of the outages is listed as ''unknown" by the Gazette. Marc Lucas, an NStar community relations representative who worked until recently exclusively with customers in Jamaica Plain, said the paper's ''unknown" count is likely inaccurate because customers who see digital clocks blinking in their homes often call the Gazette and report an outage, without calling NStar. Without a call from a customer, NStar doesn't know about the outage, which may have lasted just a second before restoring itself. ''The biggest misconception is that we know that the power's out, and that's not necessarily the case," Lucas said.

NStar records outages by circuit, and Lucas estimated that about 20 different power circuits run beneath Jamaica Plain and cross through many other neighborhoods, making a neighborhood count virtually impossible.

In any event, this spring, the JP residents' organizing has grown from informal huddling to en masse rallying in a matter of months.

John Ruch, who writes the outage column for the Gazette and who has had outages at his JP home, said he thinks the column is a fairly good sketch of the problem.

''You can get to see a pattern of outages," he said. ''It's helped for people to look at it as a neighborhood problem in a way they haven't before. JP is a community that organizes quickly and efficiently, and this affects virtually everybody in JP at one point or another. People are mad enough about it. They're bound to organize."

In February, 10 frustrated residents got together in Snoad's home, set up an easel on which they scribbled suggestions, and debated what to do. Some wanted to call NStar repeatedly. Others suggested not paying their electricity bills, or withholding a sort of ''nuisance tax" if service wasn't up to par, perhaps $1 for every outage.


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