Called On The Carpet Before Select Board, National Grid At A Loss To Explain Stroll Power Outage

National Grid executives appeared before the Select Board on Wednesday in the aftermath of the Christmas Stroll power outage in downtown Nantucket but could not yet explain the cause of the 27-hour blackout that cost island businesses millions in lost revenue.

The utility company had previously identified the problem as two sections of underground electric cable along South Water Street that failed and needed to be replaced. But, determining how and why the failure occurred may take weeks, if not longer.

"There are instances where we can tell immediately when something happens, and sometimes it's really obvious because you’ll see a vehicle hit a pole or an animal contact," said Shaun Vacher, vice president for National Grid. "This is much more challenging. There were no obvious signs of anything, so what we’ve done is when we cut those sections of cable out, they go off to our lab, and we do testing on them. It's sort of like an autopsy that’s going to reveal, hopefully, something that happened, whether it’s manufacturing, our own installations processes, or if there were environmental conditions that took effect. That analysis will take a couple of weeks. If we’re not able to discover anything with our own internal analysis, there are third-party companies that we can also send these sections of cable to see if they can discover anything."

Vacher offered an apology for the outage and told the Select Board that National Grid has closely monitored the performance of all its underground electric cables since 2000, and during the 24 years since then, there have only been seven outages along the downtown cable that failed during Christmas Stroll.

"The one that happened this weekend is the only time this section has had an issue," Vacher said.

Nantucket Island Chamber of Commerce executive director Pete Burke said his organization is currently surveying the downtown businesses that were impacted to assess the extent of their financial losses. Of the 200-plus businesses that lost power, 50 had completed the survey by Wednesday evening and reported more than $1.3 million in lost revenue. That number is expected to rise as more businesses respond to the survey.

Burke also addressed National Grid's swift denial of claims submitted by businesses for the losses resulting from the outage.

"The claims section of this, of course, is frustrating because some people have filed claims," Burke said. "So if there's an understanding or commitment that, we need the human intervention. We can't have the robot claim, come back and say, 'Hey, it's denied because it doesn't meet these parameters.' It's a very specific situation. And if the cause of the fault hasn't been determined yet, how can the claim be rejected or accepted if the forensic work on the wire hasn't been done yet? So I would just love National Grid to commit to responding to their members that were in the affected outage by saying, 'Hey, we have a timeline on these claims or a way for us to get all of our information'."

Vacher emphasized that National Grid was already planning an $8 million investment in the electrical infrastructure of downtown Nantucket that he said would help prevent similar outages from occurring in the future.

"We’re not waiting for the cable to fail before we enact a solution for it," he said. "The solution we’re putting in place resolves a redundancy/resiliency issue. If something were to happen, we can restore customers very quickly; it’s not because the cable is getting old, and we think it's going to continue to have these issues."