Massachusetts - Electric power, phones out for 3,000+; cause unknown

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(I've entered this one as "I don't know." The article doesn't state it's a "non-y2k incident." Sysops, please place this where you like. -thanks)

Power lost for schools, over 3,300 in Westford

January 07, 2000

By AUSTIN O'CONNOR, Sun Staff

WESTFORD -- More than 3,000 Massachusetts Electric customers, including three public schools, were without power for a few hours late yesterday morning after an unknown glitch knocked out service.

The failure, which struck at about 9:50 a.m., affected 3,300 customers, said Mass Electric spokesman Karen Berardino. Service was fully restored by 12:30 p.m., she said.

The cause of the malfunction was still under investigation, according to Berardino, who pointed to "potential problems" at a Westford substation.

The outage affected mostly residential customers, she said.

The Robinson School, Day School and Blanchard Middle School all lost power for nearly three hours, School Department Business Manager Everett "Bill" Olsen said. He said the school day continued normally.

"The buildings have emergency generators for security, heating and cafeteria refrigeration equipment," he said.

And, yesterday's sunshine helped schoolwork continue even in classrooms that were not lit during the failure, he said.

"It was an inconvenience, but everything continued as normal," said Olsen.

The outage also affected School Department offices, where printing of the budget proposals was delayed for a few hours.

"We worked as much as we could in darkness," said Olsen.

Phone service at the office also was out for at least part of the time during the outage, he said. Bell Atlantic spokesman Peter Bowman last night said he was unaware of any problems.

Sgt. Michael Mayer said neither phone nor power lines at the police station were affected, though he noted that there were "a lot of calls" about the disruption.

"We had no problems," he said.

The Lowel Sun Online, Massachusetts, Archive article #97986_lclwestoutage.txt

http://www.newschoice.com/newspapers/Lowell/Sun/default.asp

-- Lee Maloney (leemaloney@hotmail.com), January 26, 2000


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