The Springfield Public Safety subcommittee met with Eversource on Oct. 7 to talk about issues relating to streetlight outages following a fatal vehicular crash in late September.
Photo credit: Focus Springfield
SPRINGFIELD — A group of councilors is working with Eversource on solutions to lighting outages across the city following a late September vehicular accident in Mason Square that killed a female pedestrian.
Members of the City Council’s Public Safety Subcommittee met with the utility company on Oct. 7 to discuss updates to streetlight repairs across Springfield and how Eversource would address the 31 lights that were specifically out within a 4-mile radius in the Main Street and Bay/Boston Road area.
The conversation came a couple of weeks after a Springfield police officers responded to a car crash on the night of Sept. 26 involving a pedestrian near the intersection of State and Pleasant streets. The woman pedestrian was driven to Baystate Medical Center, where she died from her injuries.
At the Public Safety meeting, Ward 5 City Councilor Lavar Click-Bruce, who chairs the committee, said that he received messages prior to the accident about the lighting outages and argued that maybe the fatality could’ve been avoided had there been adequate lighting.
“I’m really upset with Eversource because we’re sending tons of money [and] our bill was going up,” Click-Bruce said. “The least we should be able to get is adequate lighting.”
Councilors said they’ve had discussions with Eversource about these issues for years and even conducted a similar meeting with the company earlier this spring. The problem of outages is compounded by what councilors say is a flawed reporting process where at least one resident — Bay Area Neighborhood Council Secretary Michele Hyde — was asked by Eversource to go outside and get a pole number of a light that wasn’t working.
In his remarks during the meeting, Click-Bruce said that locating a poll number on a streetlight should not be the job of Springfield residents.
“To me, that’s unacceptable,” Click-Bruce said. “If something is reported, that’s why you all have employees.”
John Caldwell, the community relations manager for Eversource, apologized on behalf of Eversource for the difficulty that some constituents may face in reporting. He said that the company uses an electronic platform that detects larger-scale outages caused by storms, but it cannot identify individual streetlight outages.
He said, however, that residents can either go on Eversource’s website or use their application to submit a rough address of where the outage has occurred, instead of a pole number.
Caldwell said that, as of press time, Eversource had 119 total work orders in the system from the city, and about 90 of them had already been assigned to get done within a week.
He added that the company has two full-time overhead contractor crews working Monday through Friday as well as a civil crew dedicated to working on feed issues in Springfield.
“I’ve confirmed with our internal teams that you can report an address, even if it’s a rough address,” Caldwell said, regarding the reporting process for constituents when they see a light out. “That at least helps us narrow the scope to understand which light is out so when we get that work order in, we can understand where it is and then we can send someone out so that they know where they’re going.”
Caldwell also provided long-term solutions to outage issues during the meeting. He shared that Eversource is finishing up the process of replacing 14,000 streetlights in the city with LED fixtures, a project that should be finished by the end of October.
He also added that Eversource is spending the next one to two years replacing current meters on homes and businesses with smart meters, which will allow for real-time monitoring and improved accuracy.
Caldwell said the new meters are connected wirelessly and will alert Eversource when a pole or an individual’s home is experiencing an outage.
“I bring that up just to say that in the short term, we are making some gains,” Caldwell said. “Longer term, we believe that we’re making a very substantial investment into our entire system that will address very specifically these issues.”
Councilors reiterated some of Click-Bruce’s frustrations with Eversource, but a couple also commended the company for making some improvements to its process.
The company once dealt with over 1,000 work orders last year before dropping that number to 119, Caldwell said.
At Large City Councilor Tracye Whitfield complimented Eversource for addressing a similar outage problem three years ago, but she wondered why the same lights are going out and emphasized the need to bring more awareness to the Eversource website for reporting outages.
She said there needs to be a better system, so residents don’t have to go out and get poll numbers.
“To be quite honest, we need more awareness,” Whitfield said. “But before the awareness, we need all these lights fixed.”
Ward 8 City Councilor Zaida Govan felt that reporting a lighting outage should not rest on the shoulders of Springfield residents. The only job of the resident is to pay taxes, she said.
“By the time I get home, I have a granddaughter, I have a husband, and I have a million other things on my mind,” Govan said. “Reporting that light out is the last thing on my mind.”
Ward 6 City Councilor Victor Davila opined that the current reporting system for lighting outages is not working and argued that the process needs to be more user-friendly.
“We know very well that this is the lighting situation; it’s not only public safety, but in my mind, it’s also economic development,” Davila said. “Good lighting also leads to economic development. Nobody wants to come to a dark city.”
Before finishing the meeting, the committee asked Eversource to follow up about fixing these outages. The committee will also work with the company on connecting them with the city’s 311 system to improve coordination around outage reporting and repairs.
Readers can visit the Eversource website to report any lighting outage in their area: eversource.com/residential/services/streetlight-request.
As of press time, two Eversource technicians had reportedly went out the night of the Public Safety meeting to inspect the 31 lights that were out.
