Happy Monday Morning, it’s good to be back on the grid with natural gas service restored to 80% of Newport customers. If you were at your home this weekend, then you had several opportunities to intercept a National Grid truck/crew to turn on your gas. I’m guessing the final 20% are vacation homes etc. and could take longer, but the worst is over. This was a unique outage. There are three towns comprising Aquidneck Island: Newport, Middletown, and Portsmouth. Newport had 6,400 outages (not all homes/hotels were impacted because they pull from a different gas line), Middletown 350. If you … [Read more...]

Good Morning. Today is day five of no natural gas service in Newport, RI. After a mild yet stormy day yesterday with temps in the low 50s, this morning is sunny with temps in the low to mid 30s. It’s hard to believe a mechanical issue could be the culprit of this man-made disaster. And that’s what it is. Because the United States is the Saudi Arabia of oil and natural gas. Take a look at the Marcellus formation in PA and you can see that it’s the lack of pipelines that are keeping Newport in the cold. The thin and narrow pipeline capacity that feeds natural gas to the Northeast is like … [Read more...]

Newport, RI has no natural gas, and the inside of homes here are hovering in the low to mid 40s. This has been National Grid’s second largest gas outage since Hurricane Sandy. And what’s odd is that it was supposedly created by a spike in demand and a faulty valve. If you’re in the heating business, wouldn’t you be ready for spikes in demand in the winter and make sure valves are in working order? Plus, there was no disruption to our electricity, and according to BU Professor Nathan Philips, regional policy dictates gas must go to heating needs before it gets to power generators. “I’m not … [Read more...]

You may have read that Newport, RI lost natural gas service Monday, impacting 7,000 customers and approximately 10,000 people. It’s reported that a single faulty valve froze at National Grid’s distribution center dozens of miles north in Weymouth, Massachusetts, causing the system’s pressure to drop significantly. Newport is located at the end of this gas line system, making it most vulnerable to a loss in pressure. Imagine your head being Weymouth and your foot being Newport and you get the idea. Monday morning was bitter cold at zero degrees, with a windchill that had a real feel … [Read more...]