Dear Squirrel readers,
Clearly a lot of people in Lincoln (including yours truly, who is writing on her laptop at Panera) are still without power. Some Lincolnites have posted about this on LincolnTalk, but I’d like to hear from as many folks as possible so I can write a story.
If you still have no power —or if you lost power but got it back after a few hours—please email lincolnsquirrelnews@gmail.com and tell me your story. Be sure to include your street address and whether you’re aware of any downed power lines near hour house. Also tell us which utility you use (we have Eversource but I don’t know if every home in Lincoln does as well). For extra credit, tell us about your longest power outage before this.
Thanks, and stay warm!
Alice Waugh
Editor, The Lincoln Squirrel
dev.lincolnsquirrel.com
781-259-0526 (h) ~ 617-710-5542 (m)
lincolnsquirrelnews@gmail.com
We lost power at 14 Beaver Pond Rd from about 1pm Fri, 2/5 until 1:30am Sun morning, 2/7. There was a large branch from a white pine stuck in the wires at 37 BPR, and the houses on Upland Field Rd and between 2 and 63 BPR were affected. EverSource trucks were at the scene about 8pm Sat night, projecting a need for a tree crew to clear the branch, electrical crew to reattach pulled wires and reset breaker at Lincoln Rd. The crew chief said there could always be more pruning, but this is typical of what he sees opinion other towns.
This is the 3rd outage since Jan 1 (1/2 for 4 hrs and 1/5 of unknown duration).
My intuition tells me that electricity delivery companies prioritize densely populated areas to get more people back in service as quickly as possible. I saw no trucks in town on Fri or Sat afternoon, and 10 on Sat night. Many had out of state license plates.
It would be interesting to know how Concord handles power failure remediation. Perhaps their crews have extra capacity that Lincoln could buy to fix local problems faster than EverSource, instead of everyone relying on residential generators to cope.
My power is back on but I still can not access the internet on my laptop. I even had a very kind visit (on a Saturday!) from my IT guy, who could get the internet on a desktop computer and, only with a cable he contributed to bypass my normal wiring, on my laptop too. However, I can not send out email: my laptop (running Windows 8.1) does not recognize any of the email addresses in my address book.
Yes, the police station was no help at all.
The power came on at 2:20 PM Saturday. It went off about 11:30 AM on Friday. We checked in at the Police station for an update this morning. The reply was ‘Eversource doesn’t keep us informed – we don’t know who or what areas are without power.’ Calls to the Eversource number in the Lincoln phone book were answered with a pre-recorded message – the objective was to have all power restored by midnight Saturday. While making a follow up call at about 2 PM today I tried a trick I saw on a TV commercial. I kept saying ‘Representative, Representative, Representative.’ It worked! A recorded message said ‘Stay on the line and a representative will be with you shortly.’ A real person -Lillian- told me the power would be back on by midnight. But, she did agreed to enter my address in the power outage list again. Twenty minutes later our furnace started up. I wonder – had Eversource made the repairs hours before, but not turned the power back on? Probably we’ll never know.
George Hibben 75 Weston Road. At least six houses in our neighborhood were without power, but two had backup generators.
Twin Pond Lane was still out this morning at 10AM. That’s just 2 hours short of 24!hours without power. It appears that Eversource did not choose their name wisely . . .
Power finally came on shortly before I arrived back home at 6:45PM for Twin Pond Lane. That’s 30 hours without power. Without Saturday’s sun and the passive solar capabilities of my house I would have had frozen pipes for sure!
Hello Alice: We don’t have much of a story here on Hillside Rd, but the power was out for 4-5 hours this time at our end, while at the end of the road they are still out. We went out to dinner in Concord where it was nice and warm. My friend from Weston Rd is still out (in their 80s) and they plow their own drive, so she went to Starbucks this morning to get warm and then came over here. The reason I write is that years ago our power was out for 4 days (the good old days) and I stood up at town meeting and said something should be done as there was a woman of 93 across the street living alone, the street was inaccessible. Talking to an Eversource guy recently he said Lincoln will never get better because we are all tree huggers and won’t let them prune trees like in other towns, straight up to the sky. Gotta go.