Belmont's Hot, But Not In the Dark, Summer

Summer is almost over and the town's electrical company wants to send its customers a well-deserved thank you.

Despite near record high temperatures and a series of long heat waves, residents and businesses apparently listened to the calls of conservation by the Belmont Municipal Light Department and have not experienced any major electrical outage this season.

"We realize that momentary outages are an inconvenience and appreciate your continued patience as we work to resolve these issues," said Tim Richardson, BMLD's general manager.

See a list of recent outages below.

One such minor outage occurred on Monday, Aug. 9 when approximately 450 customers in the Mill Street and Concord Avenue area were without power for four seconds, at 7:12 a.m.

The brief outage was due to a cable fault in Cambridge.

While consumers conserved over this summer, Light Department employees have been monitoring capacity and switching high loads from one feeder to another to prevent any major problems that could result from high-energy use throughout the past weeks.

This is a proactive approach that has helped to keep electricity flowing throughout the town, according to Richardson.

In the meantime, BMLD crews continued working to isolate BMLD customers in the Mill Street and Upper Concord Avenue area from transients along the 13.8 kV interconnection between NStar and BMLD.

The Light Department is improving this circuit by replacing the aging cable and transferring the power to another circuit to eliminate the chance of any additional high-voltage transients that have caused sporadic outages and voltage dips in the past year. Work on this project is 90 percent complete.

Recent outages

• Aug. 4: Homes in the Beech Street area went black as a result of a blown cutout fuse.

• July 28: An overvoltage condition on BMLD's 13.8 kV system resulted in the system suffering a five second "hiccup."

• July 22: Approximately 200 customers in the Mill Street and Upper Concord Avenue area lost their power.

        •    July 16: Transformer–related outage hit 20 homes on Belmont Street. 

• July 13: nearly 22 homes were affected on Becket and Watson roads due to a transformers malfunction.

• May 16: parts of Concord Road, Mill Street, Winter Street and the Kendall Garden went dark, due to the failure of the cable's high-voltage insulation along Brighton Street.