Squirrel Raccoon Responsible for North Adams, Rte. 2 Outage

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Update: The North Adams Transcript reported on Friday, April, 8, 2011, that last weekend's power outage was caused by a raccoon. We'd heard  that, too, and specifically asked the spokesman about it but were given the answer of squirrel. According to a different National Grid spokesman, the Transcript was told the raccoon "was able to get around the barriers and into the higher voltage area."

NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — A squirrel is responsible for the power outage on Saturday night that left some 1,400 customers in North Adams in the dark for nearly two hours, including Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.

National Grid spokesman David Graves said a squirrel got into a substation on Walker Street and damaged a piece of equipment. Some 28 customers in Clarksburg near the substation and another 410 along Route 2 in Florida were also affected. Power was restored at 11:27 p.m.

"All substations are equipped with anti-animal protections but squirrels can get into just about anywhere they want to go to get to a food source," said Graves.

The nosy critters are frequent disruptors of power service and have an uncanny ability to get into places they don't belong. A Google search on "squirrels power outages" returned 241,000 results in 0.14 seconds. A 2007 USA Today article (cutely named "Suicide squirrels driving utilities nuts") says the acrobatic rodents cost utitilies millions every year in equipment and manpower.

Three weeks ago, an errant crow apparently caused an arc at a substation in Greylock that cut off power to 7,000 customers in the city's West End and along Route 7 south on Saturday morning.


North Adams East End, Route 2 In The Dark
10:16PM / Saturday, April 02, 2011


NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — Nearly 2,000 National Grid customers are out of power in sections of the city and as far east as Drury along Route 2.

Power went out about 9:45 p.m. on Saturday; several customers on the east side of the city reported hearing a loud bang before the lights went out. National Grid's website says power is not expected to be back on until midnight. No further information was immediately available; if our readers have any information they are welcome to post here or at Facebook.com/iBerkshires.
If you would like to contribute information on this article, contact us at info@iberkshires.com.

North Adams' Route 2 Study Looks at 'Repair, Replace and Remove'

By Tammy DanielsiBerkshires Staff

Attendees make comments and use stickers to indicate their thoughts on the priorities for each design.
NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — Nearly 70 residents attended a presentation on Saturday morning on how to stitch back together the asphalt desert created by the Central Artery project.
 
Of the three options proposed — repair, replace or restore — the favored option was to eliminating the massive overpass, redirect traffic up West Main and recreate a semblance of 1960s North Adams.
 
"How do we right size North Adams, perhaps recapture a sense of what was lost here with urban renewal, and use that as a guide as we begin to look forward?" said Chris Reed, director of Stoss Landscape Urbanism, the project's designer.
 
"What do we want to see? Active street life and place-making. This makes for good community, a mixed-use downtown with housing, with people living here ... And a district grounded in arts and culture."
 
The concepts for dealing with the crumbling bridge and the roads and parking lots around it were built from input from community sessions last year.
 
The city partnered with Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art for the Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program and was the only city in Massachusetts selected. The project received $750,000 in grant funding to explore ways to reconnect what Reed described as disconnected "islands of activity" created by the infrastructure projects. 
 
"When urban renewal was first introduced, it dramatically reshaped North Adams, displacing entire neighborhoods, disrupting street networks and fracturing the sense of community that once connected us," said Mayor Jennifer Macksey. "This grant gives us the chance to begin to heal that disruption."
 
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