welcome to foxborough board of selectmen meeting today is october thirtieth and this is the second meeting that we had yesterday we had one in the afternoon to talk about emergency preparedness just before the storm came see the storm came last night in what kind of picking up the pieces so this is an opportunity for the emergency preparedness team to update not only the board of selectmen that but the people at home on the current state of events with  with the storm irene that just hit us so at this point i'm going to turn it over to kevin he's going to brief us and then we'll go from there thank you mr chairman members aboard i'm going to once again as we did yesterday give you kind of one of the thirty thousand overview and then go to roger from national grid and then a couple of the department heads there is both good news and bad news the good news is that it would appear as of right now that we are somewhere ten and twenty percent of the community without power at the peak of the storm last night we were told that we were around seventy five percent without power now a little unclear at this point if those numbers weren't accurate but we proceeded on the basis that seventy five percent of the community was without power in conversation with the superintendent of schools you know based upon that information and also being told that we were this would be a multi day event i e we would be out of power for multiple days superintendent of schools made the decision to cancel school and we mention this in particular because there are a lot of parents that are probably wondering today since the schools do have power what exactly happened i want to make it absolutely clear superintendent of schools was given the information and based on information the only reasonable choice was to cancel school the between last night and this morning national grid was able to recover power from a very significant number of citizens who were without it whether it was seventy five or fifty or sixty we don't know really but they got it down to somewhere around the ten or fifteen percent number by daylight basically so the information that we acted upon last night with respect to schools was accurate as of the time daybreak bought a much better situation second thing of a gentle nature i want the board to be aware of the primary problem to the extent we are out of power in time now is not local trees we actually only had about twelve thirteen fourteen large trees go down last night and roger can say more roger hill d p w director can say more about that but the primary problem is outside of tom borders once again it is these so called i loop i'm sorry union loop the union loop think large transmission lines like the big giant two hundred foot towers that  union loop two of the giant cross country towers blew over these are the huge ones you see on crossing highways those fed the i will borrow my substation now this is all the information i was given tom was going to refine this in a few minutes the union loop has twelve sections to it five of those sections were compromised in some way what we were told last night because of that situation because the vast majority of power to foxborough comes from that union loop spurs off of it that was what was responsible for most of the community being out of power at around eight o'clock or so last night the line from plainville which is separate from the union load was energized and that brought up the hospital most of route one right donna the intersection of route want to north st basically everything south of that all came up the businesses the stadium the hospital etc i did receive a call from marcy president of national grid just prior to that explaining the sensitivity of the fact that the stadium comes up in putin the rest of the town is still dark and people are upset and she very carefully explained and again i want to make it absolutely clear that is a separate feed line which comes down route one is not be if you look at the trees out there you can see that there are not many opportunities for that line to be interdicted it was a simple fix they fixed it and pollock came up the union loops a whole different story i think in the days to come what we will need to ascertain is how national grid allow the union loop to once again be compromised i think it is absolutely outrageous and i know that all of you have very strong feelings and many citizens in the community have spoken to with very strong feelings the union loop was the was the power feed that failed foxborough both with hurricane irene and then again with the halloween storm last year it was absolutely clear that the union loop was the weak point in the system i know for a fact because i went out and witnessed it the national grid spent a great deal of time working on the union loop because maintenance had been neglected on that loop for years the trees are growing up above it and they had encroached into the right away that surrounds it they blew the trees back and they reduced the masking and clearance on those trees however it's very evident that it was not done to the degree of success that would have assured in the fairly minimal conditions we had yesterday that we wouldn't suffer a fairly significant failure again i think in the days to come the board must insist on learning what failed again and receiving some assurance that this is not going to fail in the future because frankly if we end even ten or fifteen percent of the time being out for two or three days on top of two one week periods last year this is just totally outrageous in the year two thousand and twelve this should not be happening moreover communities all over the state subject to the same meterological conditions as we were did not suffer the kind of large scale power outages that we suffered and it is because of this union loop which appears to be especially vulnerable to all sorts of interdiction due to weather get to the bottom of this we've got to get this fixed so that doesn't happen again because we are certainly going to have additional storms with forty mile an hour winds that is without a doubt the last component of my overall brief  on the side of the board that counts on as you board to help veterans services are looking at their vulnerable population if it is in fact to be a multi day to vent a vent and we don't know that yet we'll learn in a minute but if it is then following this meeting we're going to compare where those vulnerable folks are to where the power is out and make a determination if we start if we need to start  a shuttling our folks to the outdoor shelter be sheltering them ourselves and if so what the appropriate setting is whether it's open a shelter or put folks in a hotel or whatever it is a we've done combinations of those things in past years so we'll make that determination and we'll plan one more meeting later today for the department heads and if the board would like when will brief of yourselves based on what we learned during the course of the day that's my kind of said the biggest thing is that overall if you look at the community we had we've got a lot of success we don't have a lot of damage as we did last year kaufman a deputy chief of bagley did an outstanding job getting out there and coordinating exactly what the damage assessment was looking like and passing an information on to national grid i want to commend the police department in the fire department for getting out there in dealing with a lot of volume in regards to alarms activations in calls that we had probably i would say we started seeing it around noon time the blame really creeping up until nine ten o'clock last night and then we had another spike around eleven and twelve and  o'clock this morning we had basically three structures that were damaged in the town so that's that's positive in bill casper went out and did inspections of those properties one b and in the end a business into being residential roger hills folks were out there doing a lot of debris removal but we didn't have anywhere near what we had last year and so the town's roadway structure is pretty well intact we don't have a lot of closed roads i do feel bad for deb we went back and forth on night trying to figure out exactly what decision to make and i do apologize but we've got a lot of unknowns the biggest thing is right now is that most of last night my biggest concern was centennial port where we had one of our two senior housing properties without power they came up early this morning had power back up so i two critical resident areas are intact there they are they're not in any jeopardy or any risk that ten fifteen percent is residential my feelings are right now i waiting to hear from tom when we think we might be getting power back up but the weather is on our side today we're going to be looking in the mid to high sixty's maybe even seventy degrees tonight the pressure the temperatures are going down around fifty six fifty eight degrees and we're looking at that for multiple days so the temperatures are definitely on our side for the residents that don't have power in regards to their decisions in our decisions on do we need to relocate them or not i'm leaning more towards that we don't have to unless they have a critical need and that's the list that vicki in my can and number working on and then we just deal with those folks as needed and just support the rest of the of those residents that are in at area specific camp with information i think that's what they're looking for and that's the key that i'm focusing on is getting the right information out to the residents outside of that i think that we as a community just really worked well together in and we were fortunate that the damage wasn't any of erroneous information but also to school superintendents benelli for the decisions she had to make based on what we told her so that's something that we're going to have to get really good at regarding the union  really described that quite well just to continue a little bit about the structure just think of it as a huge loop with radial feeders that go up to the various towns around attleboro we're we're one of those here where serve actually three substations up of the feed that comes from the union loop one in mansfield two and foxboro one down by the highway but the other one on the parts of saint rest assured that national grid takes it very seriously and if we didn't do a good job last time the regulatory process is not about fines and issuing traffic tickets in order to issue that fine there's a regulatory process that requires the company to determine what the remedial actions  are take and that's what are we going to do to repair it today what's that corrective action that we have to take to make sure it doesn't happen again so expect that the regulators will probably come down really hard on us to make sure we get that done right this time whatever that remediation is just an update on the town it seems like the union loop at least serving foxboro is back up and running the part of town that's the most affected right now is the northwest part of town so north across beach are crews up there working right now and as a matter of fact they're doing what they call the tag out procedure where they start at the first substation by the highway part and then go to the substation parts of st what they do is they have to make sure that  everything is properly isolated to the crews can get up there and work safely so once they finish their their safety briefing and start the work probably sometime early afternoon i'll have a good update for you as far as when that's going to be restored hopefully they can get out quickly but as we get near the end of the storm we're going to know the individual customers that are out to so through public safety all feed that to the board and hopefully we have some very good news this afternoon that things are going to happen very do you mean as far as what area you know i mean is it a big feeder line somewhere well actually it's not a big theater line the big theater lines go down chestnut street up mechanic straight as far as chapman chestnut street so what we're dealing with is the main theater on chestnut street that's still down and it's feeding all of those neighborhoods from north over to mechanic street ok so it's a it's a distribution line issue listen it might be pleasant street as a matter of fact the crew is on pleasant street and we just left them so they're going to deal with the tree i did offer the services of highway if the three crews need to go someplace else so long as they clear the line it's not the tree on plows and we don't know of any trees anywhere else that is taken down a primary school got to be a big piece of this again that could be but also when you're restore things you have to remember the what we call the side taps off of the main streets going out of the side streets there's one on wayne for  instance a mechanic street so what they need to do a survey that make sure it's properly isolated because if there's a short and they turn the big circuit on we won't pick up the customers because it's in a storm restoration you survey it so you can pick up as many customers as when we're going to have it's own hope and that we have a good answer because yesterday i left feeling pretty good that we were all set because you know you'd spoken about the union loop which you know we know more about the union look than we've ever had to deal with but after leaving and you know you said you had a crew right there and that crews have been working on it and i'm not picking on you you have to understand this i'm so grateful that we do have so on that's given us information right away when we need it but you know national grid is is telling us that you know we've been e f and six months we've been working all this and then to have it like still go out seventy five percent like yesterday you know and i'm driving to work this morning and i'm going through sharon and everything's lit up and well obviously there are questions that have to be answered so those are the questions that we have to answer three out of five is a majority by the way they were all up and running and we've done this dance before and i am going to try to be as respectful as i can but you know we've got businesses we've got families we've got schools cancelled and we've done this discussion before i went to the d p you hearings and testified and all we heard was was union loop and i kind of acquainted to an old chevy if the chevy can only put so many parts in it if it's broken at some point people say get rid of it and do something else i don't know what our options  easy thing is to say well we're going to privatized it but regulatory and selling the poles and buying is not going to happen and we've got to put our faith in a national grid and i've had the discussions with marcy and she kind of came down on us for going to the press and making a big deal about it and you know what i would do the same thing starting tomorrow because i'm angry the people are angry when the newspapers and the television crews set up on our common the day before to say i wonder what's going to happen to foxborough and it's almost you know a joke this is the business is a tired of it you know what you know we have one issue where you know we have a liquor violation and we have to close them down for one day and it's devastating to a business and we understand that we're working on the second day now that businesses are out of commission daycare schools we're fed up with it so i don't know what we're going to do but it's going to start at this table and it's going to go on and hopefully you know the electricity is up by the end of today but we're just sick and tired of it all right i don't know what's special about foxboro that it's the center of the big joke of electricity but it can't continue and we're tired of it so if that's a message you can take back to marcy in the d p you for the second round of you know if you're going to call mitigations to fix it let's start there because i don't want to be doing this again next year and there was no you know the big sails on the trees you know the leaves fell that wasn't the issue you go through the towns i can say enough for the d p w in the board of health and the seniors in our town we took care of we did as much as we could and at some point a lesser electricians and can climb up that poll in the morning i just don't see the love coming back to foxboro in showing us the crews here i see a lot of promises i see a lot of what ifs and will be there but at the end of the day all that goes away after the second day without electricity and all our neighbors have it so there's probably nothing you can say on that side of the table that can you know to console us right now but i don't know where to go with this yeah mr chairman spend you know the day care all that money that came in from the last in a understand it's still a process what can we expect on our electric bills what can we expect moving forward that somebody hears it and it's not start somewhere up at the the corporate level in the you know the higher up what do we tell people when you know i got a cell phone just from this morning of of questions what do we tell people other than we're going to do better next time on this union loop because it's not fox but it doesn't seem to be in foxborough time he was going to come to our select his meeting and be honest with us you got a little cold feet because of the tension and she didn't want to be in the auditorium can we have somebody that can answer the question at our table for the benefit of the people sooner than later as  soon as next week so you know we'll try to curb it so it's not a lot of anger and hostility but the answers need to come in the questions need to be asked publicly because it seems like it worked a little bit last time with the d p you and somebody heard us and that's why the fines were there terms of a filing with the d p or how does that work at this point well i think the first step is the information gathering step i'll be asking as soon as we are through the emergency phase meaning as soon as power is restored over the union lou and i'm not seeing crews here fast enough there's no reason why crews on shouldn't already be here staged and should have been working this morning at five o'clock or five o'clock there was not enough wind to keep a  a bucket truck from operating they should have been here and they weren't so those are the two big failings i suspect will end up saying in terms of locally lesson learned we really didn't you know roger in the department who dealt standing work i think they get an a plus you know chief the d put over director all the departments just did phenomenal work from all the lessons that we learned last year and as jim said we did everything we could short of climbing poles and put electricity back up so i don't think they'll be a lot there once they are as written and delivered to the board and then it gets turned over to council council prepares the d p you  a representation if you will it's a it's a notice that we are a party of interest we're not allowed under the current statute to bring a claim ourselves that brought as a class action if you will by the attorney general but we're  party of interest put it that way opportunity is there provided to us to go and make our comments at the hearing with our representatives but i figured the end of the day i said this last year when to say it again the law is deeply flawed it doesn't allow for instance when the a g s is a fine it doesn't allow any sort of recompense to individual rate payers so here you are an individual right payer and you've lost a refrigerator full of food you maybe have a hotel bill for two or three days and whatever other expenses you might have but the state gets the fine this is a ridiculous system it's just a truly ridiculous system and the town can't correct the problem  if you heard but national public radio a local affiliate in boston did a story of why have there been no minister paul pollock corporations formed in the last fifty or sixty years because the law is so deeply flawed in the way it values the assets  can then turn around and buy them that it is hopeless no town in a void can do it so the law got filed last year and with a full head of steam pushed by a hurricane irene and the halloween storm  people were confident that the legislature would finally do something and your members sat right here at this table and i said forget it twenty or thirty million lobbying dollars from national grid and star in the rest of the investor owned companies will kill that bill and what it do it kill the bill and so we still have no effective means to really ensure that the public gets the kind of effort to make these facilities operate properly for as i no effective way to fix it because the only effective way to fix it is for us to own the asset or become a customer of mansfield we'll find out how many customers in mansfield around yesterday would represent thousand people this is just ridiculous but you're hearing some frustration and i apologize but the reality is this won't get fixed by anybody other than the legislature changing the law so that customers can get some recompense when the fines get levied people who suffered get the money back not the commonwealth would millions of people who didn't suffer anything and they are benny benefiting from it and the town government to foxborough and any other affected community being able to effect real change by having some choice and who supplies was part national grid can't get it right then we'll go buy it from mansfield miscible power company oh formal muni can't do it right now so that's obviously a discussion for  and i just turned to roger hell to come to him i can just talk about the two pumps that are down in but we still have plenty of water for the community the wells on sprague are down because we have two trees  pretty soon soon enough for us to meet any demands that the system might have and demand is very low right now as you can imagine so you're kind of on hold right now till national grid koreans take the wireless and from a d p w standpoint  first i want to thank the chief of police and the fire chief for great cooperation throughout the storm we decided to quadrant the town we put heavy piece of heavy equipment in three guys in each quadrant and it really worked out better than the last time where if a if the police or the fire found a problem that we needed to be at we were at it very quickly so we got the big stuff out of the road one thing i want to say to the residents everybody needs to become a catch basin cleaner in the town of foxborough especially this time of year we have some localized flooding and it's mostly due to the fact that the catch basins are clogg leaves as we would expect because most of the leaves and we do have the perennial problem with water over overtopping more street just south of the bleachery but we're working with conservation to try to work out a solution to that right now too so thank of the homeowners in foxboro i live on oak street in the past month we've had power a loss of power today two separate times and it didn't come from a storm you know not a hurricane and not from a snowstorm it came because people had on their private property old broad weak and trees and it's on private property and i think you know i know it's very expensive to do i've taken down seven absolutely beautiful blue spruces killed me to do it but they were fifty feet tall and they were any of the wires it had to be done so i think we as homeowners also need to assume some responsibility because our neighborhood was with a lot for power and we can you know so i think you know we need to start looking at that too and being responsible and very good point thanks and i have wanted to mention because we should give credit i don't know if w rogers is about to say but we should give credit where credit is due to national good didn't bark on a mass of tree and limb clearing program here in town aided by our own tree crews and it would appear that that effort was most effective because we have very very few limbs and trees and wires and most of what we did is not in the public right of way which we could have affected right on to sandy's point most of what occurred during the storm was on private property that we can affect the national grid and i won't treat apartment those deserve a lot of kudos because you're seeing the result of their excellent work right now in that area wells and thank you the last comment that i is actually at another meeting couldn't be here in regards to the folks that lost power yesterday i don't think we have any health concerns in regards to the food that was in your fridge rater or any of that type of things my comments right now are the ten fifteen percent that don't have power pending on what happens in how much power you know how much longer we go without power we want everybody to be very concerned about their fridge ration and again that the message we gave last year is the same message this year is that if you have any question or you have any doubt about its ability to be eat and not have a doubt throw it out we don't want anybody especially with the folks that have no power if you have any questions about the ability of that food still being good don't take any risks don't take any chances just get rid of it ok anyone else in the public that wanted to if you could so if you want to just come to the microphone and for the record if  five days a week and this year i guess my question is this i wasn't aware of the union loop does that feed that area of edwards road and beach  that all part of it was that come off of route one yeah that comes from one of the two substations in town the one by the highway barn and or the one off of neponset street or on the ponds at st not off of  so if it's up near beach street say right now yes that's not related to the the so called sub transmission line that comes to this is to substations that's fed from the union that's actually local damage that's that's occurring so that would be trees that have fallen on the lines fuses that have opened up because the lines have been shorted or something like that so i've actually been up there today and and have been up there quite a bit in the last two days to take a look you have an estimate as to when something like that's going to yeah that's what i had what i promised to do is when i figure out where the crews are because they're in the process of working up there right now it's probably early afternoon try to get the estimated time of restoration for that area too so i'll feed that through the fire chief and the town manager the reason i'm asking that question is do  i go through the time and energy of securing a generator knowing that is it going to be three days is it going to be five days is it going to be a week or is it going to be today sometime i mean you know i'm just going for an approximation yeah you know i said some things yesterday about confidence that the union would hold and it didn't i would like to think based on what i saw today that much of that northwestern part of town is going to can have another meeting at sixty four o'clock and at that point when we have more information we're going to do a third public information release we're going to do another one following this meeting and then a third one this afternoon after we  brief the board again and that hopefully we'll have the information to tom's talking about where we can give an approximation of the damage hopefully we've got a lot of the power brought back up but we're able to tell folks that aren't roughly and reverse nine one one to be a message saying another one tonight so hopefully with all those different means of broadcast one of those will be accessible to you and you can get that update or you can call here in physically we'll tell you we'll have that statement ready to be read by folks who answer the phone well it i get my only comment is if you don't have power you don't have facebook you don't have a computer you don't have a lot of means of access accept by very basic telephone so that's that's what we're hoping with all these alternative means is that folks have that if they've got a phone that they've got facebook or twitter if they don't  last resort call here write them a number and someone will read to you what it is will but i wouldn't do that till about five o'clock to be sure we've got the information ready by then and we are open tonight low consul an aging human service director we called all of the people that are the on the critical needs list you know people that have significant health issues that are in that northwest corner has about a dozen people we've been able to reach all except two and one of them will need to be sheltered if we do not have power today you know by the by tonight so i'm just waiting to hear but the good news is a lot of people have gone with family and  we've been able to get in touch with their contacts so we're in pretty good shape that way and i would just encourage anyone like this gentleman if you have a cell phone get it on reverse nine one one so that you can hear those informational messages as as  participated last year i just wanted to say thank you for i mean you've got almost a personal knowledge of where the critical needs people are at to talk to john and eric this morning over at the two state run housing facilities and i'm very appreciative of the work that you did in all the outreach and i know you came in on your day away yesterday to do this so very very well done thank you if you don't have power you probably can't recharge your cell phone so anybody who wants to come down to the counter now we're happy to do that for that very good song thank you everybody else that's it mr chairman other than a  board is i know you have a meeting tonight so you're back in here at seven o'clock for that do you want to briefing at four o'clock or would you prefer may be come in to the meeting early tonight we'll do the brief then or as they want to add like to get the information out to the people as soon as possible so as soon as you know time is you know checks in with his folks i'd like to get that information out there as soon as possible and i want to wait until  computers to the extent hopefully they're working on your cell phones get it we'll send the information out over all those other means i already mentioned and hopefully you'll get it and if all else fails call roger rye and we'll give it to you personally then you don't really have to come back here and meet but the public is going to get it just as fast as we've got it we may have it at two o'clock for that matter we don't know so we'll do that and then we'll repeat it publicly at the seven o'clock meeting mr chairman if you want to give us five or ten minutes at the beginning we'll do a quick summary make sense of everybody i read somewhere on one of my e mails that he was going to be in town today so i'd like to don't know when she couldn't give me a she couldn't give me a time because the coastal communities where i guess they've got some customer base are in much much worse shape ironically maybe not with power outage but with other related problems that they're dealing with so she couldn't give me a time and in fairness i  couldn't pin her down to a time i mean it's not reasonable so i don't know when she'll be here i think the biggest issues that we're going to talk about is how many how many people are left and what is going to come on so that information goes in a press release the report of the chronicle patch of mi webber at fox for a cable that can go out we don't have to meet as a board for that and if it sounds like it's going bad by three o'clock email us and they will set up a meeting for ok i don't want to meet and take everyone's time if