An underground fire near the corner of Commonwealth Avenue and St. Mary’s Street caused a power outage Tuesday night that affected numerous Boston University students living in the nearby apartments and on Bay State Road.
The fire was caused by a “cable fault,” said NSTAR spokeswoman Margaret Caughlan. She said cable faults are usually caused by moisture that seeped into underground power lines that were already weakened by the cold winter.
Power went out around 10 p.m. and was returned to most of the residences by 11:15 p.m., according to Caughlan.
When the Boston Fire Department arrived on the scene just after 10 p.m., smoke was billowing out of the manhole near the MBTA tracks. Fire officials on the scene pulled off the manhole cover and let smoke spew out until NSTAR crews arrived.
A Boston Police Department official said BUPD had responded to the “manhole fire,” and Caughlan said it is not uncommon for fires to result from cable faults.
Caughlan said 225 customers were affected by the outage, but it was unclear how many students were without power – 225 power meters went out.
“It could be that some buildings have individual meters,” she said.
As of 11:45 p.m. Tuesday night, NSTAR crews were still working on fixing the problem, but Caughlan said power was restored to a number of the buildings by 11:15 p.m. She said the rest would be finished by 1:45 a.m.
“The wires are all in pipes, and [to repair them] they put a piece of good wire into the pipe and it’s done,” she said, adding that “there has been a lot work” in the area recently, which is why a similar outage had not occurred sooner.
College of Fine Arts junior Sarah Miller said she was working at Espresso Royale, near the site of the smoking manhole, when the power went out.
“The music stopped, everything shut off, everything went dark,” she said.
Despite the darkness, Miller said customers remained in the café working on their laptops. It was not until several minutes had gone by without power that employees decided to close for the night.
Miller said when she went to investigate the cause of the outage, CVS night employees told her about the smoke coming from the pothole.
“They said the pothole [cover] flew like three feet in the air,” she said.
Another witness at the scene reported hearing a loud buzzing noise followed by a louder popping noise right before the power went out in her residence.
Miller said the loss of revenue would not be large, but much of the perishable food will be lost.
College of Communication junior and Bay State Road resident Emily Novak said she was doing homework in her room when the power suddenly went off.
“A police officer came to our door because he thought the fire alarm had gone off in our building,” she said.
Unaware of the cause of the power outage, Novak and her roommate evacuated their building and said they did not plan on returning until the power was restored.
Caughlan said the outage was limited to Bay State Road and the Commonwealth Avenue apartments because there are a number of different circuits that connect buildings in the area.
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