The warmer temperatures Sunday were welcome to many of us who have grown tired of this brutal winter. But the temperature also meant new problems, as snow and ice fell off buildings.
“Right in the corner,” said John Meany of Boston’s Inspectional Services Department as he pointed down Loring Street in South Boston. “Where you can see it’s down where the wires are hanging right down there, there was a huge piece of ice that fell and took down the wires with it.”
If you were to look at where he’s pointing, behind a string of caution tape, is a tangle of the electric wires that came crashing down. John Coburn lives on the block, and says his fiancée owns the rental house where the ice knocked the wires down.
“Just luckily, nobody was going by,” Coburn said.
Coburn says it took NStar an hour and a half to respond to the live wires in the street. He has ice on his house, too, and Meany told him to call an electrical inspector from the city about that.
“And he’ll come and he’ll coordinate with the contractors, have the power shut,” Meany said. “And then we can start chipping away at the ice.”
If you walked up the block, you’d see frozen waterfalls running down each row house, and the electrical wires encased in that ice, meaning this is likely to happen a lot more.
“They’re telling us we have to get all the ice off the dams and stuff, which we already know that but trying to get a hold of somebody is another thing,” said Laureen Dowdy, who lives next door to the house where the wires just came down. “And the roofers that you do call, they say they don’t deal with the ice dams.”
Dowdy did get the number of one company that removes ice dams, but when she called them, this was their voicemail message. “Our hourly rate for both ice dam removal and rooftop snow removal is $475 an hour with a two-hour minimum.”
A minimum charge of $950.
“When you hear pricing like that, you know, we’ll make referral to the Better Business Bureau and we’ll make sure that these people are looked at,” Meany said. “Because, don’t take advantage of situations like this when people need help.”
Ice dams and snow-covered roofs are a problem all over the place. Lt. Mike Walsh of the Boston Fire Department says between Saturday night and Sunday afternoon, the BFD responded to more than 300 incidents because of the conditions, including six buildings that were compromised, and several where water was getting inside, causing concerns about electricity.
“We had snow come off a slate roof, a church in the South End, with such force that when it came off it literally pushed the cars that were parked into the street,” Walsh said.
Fortunately we didn’t get as much rain as had been predicted this weekend, but Walsh says that with the rain we did get, on top of all that snow, there’s as much 42 pounds per square foot on some roofs. And Walsh says that’s enough to lead to more building collapses, especially as the snow keeps melting. He recommends finding a reputable contractor to help get it off.
