“People of means were certainly able to take care of themselves better.”
This interview with Andover Director of Public Health Thomas Carbone (excerpted and edited below for clarity) is part of a Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism series retracing the Merrimack Valley gas explosions five years after the tragedy shook Andover, Lawrence, and North Andover, Massachusetts. You can read and explore the complete coverage here.
The event happened on a Thursday night. The public safety department decided that the safest thing to do was to cut power to the affected neighborhoods, and we didn’t start seeing power return until Saturday or Sunday. Anybody who had no power, their refrigerator was warm and they lost all that food.
There were a lot of food donations made through our senior center; we basically opened a pantry over there for people who needed to replace their food. We have two supermarkets in town: Whole Foods Market was not impacted like we’d thought they’d be, and I think it was because they had back-up power.
Stop & Shop had to wait for permission to reenter their space and salvage what they could since their power was down for the weekend. I remember working with their sanitarians on Sunday morning to see about the possibility of salvaging some of their frozen products to distribute to the food banks. Unfortunately, when they got in there they realized that it was too far gone and that they would be unable to share it, so they had dumpsters and dumpsters filled with food that had to be disposed of. The restaurants were all in the same boat. They lost anything that had to be refrigerated, but it didn’t take too long to get back what they needed and I am fairly certain that most of the costs were covered by Columbia Gas.
With gas, people had to rethink what they were going to do. If you were a couple who didn’t have kids in the school system, you might be able to relocate to a hotel room, and people were going miles and miles away for that. But if you had a kid in the school system, you couldn’t go to a hotel in Peabody and be able to bring the kid to school everyday. Columbia Gas actually arranged to have an ocean liner dock in Boston and they put those people up there, which allowed them to then relocate some of our residents. We also had temporary trailers coming in.
When I found out we were bringing in trailers, my first thought was, What do we need to think about, from a public health standpoint, with this? We had to think about water, wastewater, trash, things like that. We were trying to work through what we really needed to worry about.
Eventually it occurred to me that, about five years prior, I attended a training on environmental health and emergency management and we were able to go back into the book and find the appropriate pages. It’s important for us to continue this emergency management training; I don’t think we always concentrate on that, but this was something that was really important to come forward.
Initially, Columbia Gas and the emergency management department had thought about deploying portable space heaters and the governor activated the National Guard to help with distribution. It didn’t take long for everybody in that decision-making group to realize that wasn’t going to be a viable solution, especially when you get into the older housing stock in Lawrence and in our area, too. The electrical services were not large enough to safely utilize those space heaters; the hot plates were there really to allow people to at least cook in their kitchen while they were waiting for their replacement appliances.
Each of the three communities had trailer parks that we set up and those trailers at least had some heat. It wouldn’t have gotten you through the winter, but it was enough to warm up on a fall night. Then as we got into November, they were actually bringing in portable heating systems that could heat multiple homes. We had a few in our downtown area.
People of means were certainly able to take care of themselves better. They were able to hire a contractor and have people come in to convert their gas-powered hot water system to electric. Homeowners were more able to navigate things because the state sanitary code provides minimum standards of fitness for homes that include the provision of hot water and the provision of heat from Sept. 15 onward. But we did see an impact on those who were renting.
As we got into October, the three communities started to get a lot of calls from renters who wanted to know what their rights were and had complaints. That caused us to go to the housing court in Lawrence and we talked about the expectation that there was going to be an increase in claims in housing court. We had the Attorney General’s Office involved, and they and the courts were really trying to find a reasonable path through all of this to protect the consumer, protect the public health, but also to understand that this, in the grand scheme of things, was short term and really out of the control of a lot of property owners.
It’s hard for anybody living on the edge; they don’t want to turn in a call for a housing inspection or make a complaint because they know that it is going to come back to that landlord. And despite the law saying that a landlord can’t retaliate for contacting the board of health or inspectors services, it happens. I think that we probably would have gotten more calls if renters felt protected.
This article is syndicated by the MassWire news service of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. If you want to see more reporting like this, make a contribution at givetobinj.org
