Boston University’s College of Fine Arts, the Guitar Center building and approximately 556 other NStar customers in Allston, Brighton and Brookline along Commonwealth Avenue lost power for two hours last night, at the same time as the Brookline Fire Department reported to several calls in the same area.
Power to the area went out at 5:57 p.m., according to NStar spokesman Mark Reed. NStar workers reported immediately and began restoring electricity by 7 p.m., Reed said. All power was restored by 8:10 p.m., he said.
CFA’s power was restored with the last customers at 8:10.
Reed said the outage was because of a ‘fault’ in an underground cable that serves the area. He said there is no indication of what caused the problem.
Power was out for two hours for many customers because NStar workers had to locate the problem underground and make sure no equipment was damaged by the fault, Reed said.
‘The thing that takes time is trying to locate the fault,’ Reed said. ‘Once it’s located, it can be isolated.’
Once workers were sure there was no other damage, Reed said they were able to switch the areas affected by the fault to a different electric circuit.
Students gathered outside CFA during the outage after Boston University Police Department officials secured the building. Several students said they had to cut music lessons short or had to cancel rehearsals altogether.
Xu Wang, a second year CFA graduate student, returned to the building during the outage after having left for dinner before power went out. He left his bass in the building’s basement and was not allowed back in during the outage because of BUPD security orders.
Wang said his instrument could have been damaged by a long outage because of the frigid temperatures.
‘If it is really dry and cold, it is possible to get a crack in the instrument,’ he said.
Meanwhile, Guitar Center employees said the outage cost the store thousands of dollars. Employees were forced to kick 25 to 30 people out of the store because of liability issues, employee Brett Duckett said. The power loss also hurt the 12 employees working in the store at the time, who were unable to receive commissions on sales, though they were still paid by the hourly rate, Duckett said.
Brookline Fire trucks reported to separate calls at 900 Commonwealth Ave. and 920 Commonwealth Ave. during the outage and just after power was restored.
Women in the Healthworks fitness center at 920 Commonwealth Ave. reported a suspicious odor near the building’s elevators at 6 p.m., according to BFD officials. They said the odor was from the elevators’ hydraulic system and was not harmful.
‘Some of the women there got real nervous,’ BFD spokesman Jack DeWann said.
BFD trucks responded to a ‘light smoke condition’ at 900 Commonwealth Ave. after power was restored, department officials said. DeWann said a plastic bucket caught fire after being placed near some machinery in the building. No other damage was reported.
Staff writer Monika Galvydis contributed to this report.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
