Hingham Journal and Patriot Ledger
POWER UPDATE: Light plant crews kept busy
Mon Dec 22, 2008, 12:45 PM EST
Hingham - The Hingham Municipal Lighting Plant (HMLP) crews have been busy with the recent weather that has taken over New England. A week ago an ice storm blanketed Central and Western Massachusetts and Southern New Hampshire causing over 1 million customers to lose their electricity. Hingham was fortunate to not be impacted by this storm, but did provide some assistance to an area hot hard by the storm. Three crew members from the HMLP Line Department have spent 10 days in Sterling, Mass. assisting in restoring power to that town’s electric customers as the Town was hit particularly hard by the ice storm. The crew expects to be in Sterling until Tuesday (Dec. 22) making sure the customers have their power back for the Holidays. This crew is there based on a mutual aid agreement that exists between the Public Power entities in New England.
"We have a solid agreement and process for assisting each other in emergency events, like the ice storm of last week’" said General Manager John G. Tzimorangas of HMLP. “These are tough situations and it is nice to know the other public power systems are there to assist each other when it is necessary."
The storm that brought heavy snow to the South coast of Massachusetts on Friday night and Sunday afternoon kept the HMLP crews busy responding to the customer calls related to their electric service. On Friday night around 5 p.m., an outage in the Hull Street, Fisher Road, Canterbury Street and Weir Road areas were responded to by the line crews who were available for storm coverage and the power in the area was restored just before 6 p.m.. The rest of the weekend kept the crews busy with calls from customers reporting branches and tree limbs on the wires and a few isolated power outage calls that were responded to by the crews.
