A Post-Blizzard Message from the Braintree Electric Light Department

Below is a letter from the GM of the Braintree Electric Light Department on the Blizzard of 2013:

The Blizzard of 2013 was an historic storm that will most certainly be talked about for years to come. The combination of heavy snow and wind gusts over 65 mph brought down trees and power lines in Braintree, leaving many homes without heat and electricity. As you know, Braintree Electric Light Department
(BELD) staff and crews worked diligently throughout the storm, doing everything within our abilities to restore power and limit the number of affected customers within our community.

All 15,895 BELD customers experienced an outage during the storm. For 43 percent of them, the outage lasted only 13 seconds. A large group of the other 57 percent (9,000 customers) were interrupted three times for a total of 3 hours and 15 minutes between Friday evening and Sunday afternoon. These outages were caused by the loss of NSTAR transmission lines feeding the town of Braintree.

A smaller segment of that group (1,000 customers) were without power up to an additional 14.5 hours. The longest outage was 23 hours for a commercial (with its own generator) whose primary feed is from a pole that was broken, requiring extensive equipment replacement.

In addition, our crews were called in for about nine hours between Friday night and Saturday morning due to the unsafe weather and road conditions. Overall, these numbers are a testament to the sound engineering, construction, and maintenance of the BELD system.

We appreciate your understanding and cooperation during this nor’easter, and we want you to know that we will always give maximum effort in providing you with the best possible service. We can’t always give you an estimated restoration time or the reason for an outage—and in storms of this magnitude we may be answering thousands of calls and messages—so your patience is to be commended, especially during belowfreezing temperatures.

It was inspiring to witness our community working together during a very difficult situation. We’d also like to acknowledge our employees who put themselves in harm’s way, leaving their own families behind, and worked around the clock to respond to customer needs in an admirable manner.

Remember, we are your hometown electric, Internet, cable and phone provider.

For more information about any of our services, please feel free to call us at 348.BELD(2353).

Sincerely,
William Bottiggi
General Manager