There was no surprise a storm was headed Hingham’s way on Halloween. Stories of kid’s Trick or Treat evenings possibly being curtailed filled social and print media and the airways. HMLP was staffed and prepared for the bad weather and had field and admin staff in place for the wind’s onslaught. General Manager Paul Heanue reported, "NOAA was predicting rain through the night with sustained winds in the mid-20 mph range and gusts mostly, except for about one hour when they would top out at 50 mph, in the mid to upper 40 mph range."
The 1st outage call came in at 11:53 and was in the Tower Road area. The wind took down a large tree and wire and about 30 customers lost power. Things remained relatively quiet until about 3:00am when the winds picked up and HMLP got quite busy. Over the course of the next hour HMLP had larger outages in the Lazell Street, Saw Mill Pond Road, Prospect Street, Harvest Lane and Liberty Pole Road areas with a few single service calls mixed in for good measure. There were approximately 1200 customers impacted by the uptick in winds that came in from about 3-4am. HMLP continued to take outage calls, all from individual customers, through mid-morning. As of about 1:00pm today, all customers, with the exception of a couple who need their electricians to make repairs before their services could be re-energized, were back on.
From start to finish HMLP took 132 outage calls, 7 were for single services, and had about 1240 customers without power.
Heanue added, "once again the value of having its own light plant was demonstrated to Hingham’s residents and businesses." Outage calls were taken and fielded by HMLP staff who were already in Hingham when they started to arrive. Since Hingham doesn’t have to share field resources with any other town our line and field folks are working in Hingham until Hingham’s troubles are resolved. Then there’s the "oh by the way" fact HMLP spends their days trimming trees all year long which helps on a night like last. It’s that type of attention to maintenance details that help on a stormy night.