NSTAR Officials Discuss Possible Emergency Response Changes with Sherborn Selectmen

Officials from NSTAR discussed their proposed changes to their Emergency Response Plan before the Sherborn Board of Selectmen Thursday night.

JoAnne O’Leary, NSTAR Community Relations and Economic Specialist and Walter Salvi, Metropolitan Manager of Community Relations and Economic Development for NSTAR went before the selectmen to outline some of the changes being discussed within the company since some residents were left without power for weeks following Tropical Storm Irene and the Halloween nor'easter last year.

Also in attendance was Sherborn Police Chief Richard Thompson, Sherborn Fire Chief Josh Buckler and head of Community Maintenance and Development Ed Wagner.

From all parties, improving communication seemed to be the biggest concern going forward.

“We have no way of explaining to them (residents) when NSTAR is coming out, when the power is going to come back on,” Thompson said.

“I think communication was a real issue and I think the sense I get from the community is that they want to see what you’re going to be doing different,” Selectmen Paul DeRensis said.

“What we found is that the communications did flow but it was really the information that you needed really needs improvement,” O'Leary said.

O'Leary said part of that improvement would come from newly trained workers whose job it is to keep in contact with officials from multiple towns during a serious storm situation.

“We have individuals that have been trained as communicators…And they will reach out not to ten towns but maybe just two or three towns,” O'Leary said.

The “dedicated communicators” for Sherborn will reach out to the town officials before, during and after a storm and report back to NSTAR the needs of the community. “We anticipate that that should improve the communications," O'Leary said.

Some other changes outlined during the meeting include:

-Each town will have one person who is a direct point of contact and will deal with NSTAR during an event involving outages in town.

-The person who is the direct point of contact for the town will be communicating with NSTAR and will give them their top three priorities in their town after a storm with outages.

-NSTAR workers on the ground are now cross-trained to work underground and on overhead lines.

-Instead of ground crews receiving multiple tasks to handle at once and then reporting back they will now receive one task at a time and then report.

-NSTAR will implement an aggressive tree trimming plan during an event such as Tropical Storm Irene where there were mass amounts of outages in town due to fallen trees and branches.

“We’re not going to take no for an answer," Salvi said of the tree trimming. "We’re going 8 feet by 8 feet to the sky in this type of situation.”

The new Emergency Management Plan, which has not yet been adopted by NSTAR, would be company-wide and not just specific to Sherborn.

“There is no plan for Sherborn. There is a plan for the system. There is no individual plan. There is a plan how we respond as a corporation to system-wide outages,” Salvi said.

However, NSTAR is also discussing designing individual town portals on their website for town officials to utilize during severe storms that includes information about when crews will be in town and where they are making restorations and what percentage of the town is without power.

The selectmen and public safety officials expressed their concerns in regard to the major outages in town last year.

Since Sherborn residents get their water from wells, unless they have a backup generator, when the power goes out they are left without working water in their home.

“We actually had residents filling up bottles of water in front of the police station,” Thompson said.

NSTAR's philosophy during the major storms last year was to restore the largest number of customers in the shortest period of time, according to Salvi. “We’re changing that to respond to the priorities to clear roads, to get schools open, a shelter may be your first priority. Just to get people to water and to medical care,” Salvi said.

“We’re going to see how that works understanding that that could prolong the length of some outages going forward,” said Salvi.

Selectmen George Pucci said that although the changes, if implemented, may help they do not get more feet on the ground fixing the outages when they take place.

“It doesn’t seem that you are beefing up at all your emergency response ability,” Pucci said. “It is troublesome and we’d like you to hear it from the municipal standpoint - and I hope you hear it from more municipalities. It seems to us that you could do a better job - with what a lucrative business NSTAR is – that you could do a better job devoting more resources to having more of an emergency response. To get more crews out there.”

Selectmen chair Tom Twining said, “What we really want to do here is to have a better relationship and understand what you can do so that if it comes down to a point where you have to say to someone ‘We can’t do that.’ Then we have a relationship with our emergency management people that can bring that so that we can manage it and so we don’t have people who don’t know what’s happening."

The officials from NSTAR plan to meet with maintenance officials in Sherborn to further discuss the tree trimming policy in town.