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Hundreds of South Boston homes remain without power; some people slept in their running cars
By adamg on Mon, 07/25/2022 - 9:27am
Eversource now says it could be around 11:15 a.m. before some 745 customers between L Street and Farragut Road get back the power they lost around 7:45 p.m. yesterday - although a few might not be able to turn their AC back on until 12:30.
Ole Uncle Schneids reports some of his neighbors got in their cars and cranked them, and their AC, on and spent the night in them.
Around 1:10 a.m., he couldn't sleep anyway, so went down and talked some of the Eversource guys busy replacing burned out cables along East 6th Street:
Large majority of the east side is still out. All the Eversource activity is on the corner of East 6th and N which is like 200 yards from our place. Like 20 minutes ago walked down and asked a guy to give it to me straight and he said it’s going to be 3 hours at least.
Basically said there’s miles and miles of old cable, overworked cable down there so it takes a decent amount of time to even pinpoint what’s fried and where it’s exactly location is. Then I guess it takes time to put in a replacement and get things up and running.
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Comments
Old cables
The cable supplying my building burnt out a few years back. Building over 120 years old. Granted, it was a smaller outage, but it took them 3 days to figure out how to replace the 100 feet of cable buried below the street without tearing up the street the whole distance. Conduit was filled with sand.
Welcome to the feel of Old Southie back in the Day
This used to happen almost every heat wave in Southie back in the Day, the 1960s and 70s. It was called a blackout. There were times when one side of a block had power and the other side was dark. The lights use to blink and flicker on and off quite a lot.
The Edison power plant up the street would blow its four stacks around 11 o'clock at night and the power would go out or a manhole would explode in one of the intersections on L street and the manhole cover would be rolling around the intersection for a couple of minutes before hitting a parked car.
You'd be out sitting on the porches or walk down to the beaches with beach chairs to try and get some sleep as the cars didn't have AC at that time, (AM Radios, roll down windows, white walls and curb whispers). The mosquitos would eat ya alive.
You'd loose all the food in the frig and the freezer. A lot of people would walk up to O'Neil's Ice and Fuel on East Second Street to buy ice for coolers to trying and save stuff.
Lots of people had to use candles and flashlights.Why the neighborhood didn't burn down was just by the Grace of God.
The only good memory I had of a power failure was being out on the back porch with my old man and there was about five portable radios going in the back yards, all listening to the Red Sox game over at Fenway.
And then in the winter
We had to walk barefoot, uphill in the snow to school, only to find that it was closed and we had to walk back, again uphill, to our unheated triple-decker.