Shrewsbury Police, Fire and Selco on the scene....
SHREWSBURY, Massachusetts – Driving home after a seemingly normal pickup of my kids at Shrewsbury High School, I found myself in the middle of my very own news story this afternoon.   As we were waiting to make the turn from Holden Street onto Main Street, we witnessed across the street on North Quinsigamond Ave,  first  a large burst of sparks from the top of one telephone pole, and then instantly a crash and explosion, as the next light pole collapsed into the street, taking down over 100 feet of live electrical wires which exploded as they slammed into the ground.    All of this occurred, as best as we could tell, with absolutely no apparent cause at all, although one person reports that the pole was hit by the white pickup truck at the scene.
Live wires on the ground is always a bad scene as as they continued to spark and fizzle, onlookers kept pulling over to watch, which of course left them parked on the side of the road underneath all the wires.  Fortunately a few of the residents in the homes there, now trapped in their properties by the dangling high tension wires, were good enough to walk down and warn everyone to get out from under the lines, while I called the Police, and asked them to comes on out and bring along SELCO to shut down the wires.   They responded within minutes, and promptly sealed off the roadway, at which point the SELCO crew were able to get to work shutting down power and getting the new pole replaced.
Up at Shrewsbury High School, power went out immediately, just as sports teams were beginning their afternoon workout schedule.  Shortly after things there went dark, the emergency power came on to supply at least limited lighting to the building, and things returned to at least some sense of normalcy.
Residents cars trapped behind the fallen wires....
In the end, nobody was injured, and while the timing wasn’t great in terms of traffic nightmares, had it happened 15 minutes earlier as the bulk of the parents and school buses were existing the school grounds, it could very easily have been a disaster.  Nice work on the park of the emergency responders, doing today what they do every other day, and keeping us safe.
As of 630PM, that intersection is still closed, but they do have the new pole in place.  Now it’s just a matter of moving the wires over.

Shrewsbury Police, Fire and Selco on the scene....

SHREWSBURY, Massachusetts – Driving home after a seemingly normal pickup of my kids at Shrewsbury High School, I found myself in the middle of my very own news story this afternoon.   As we were waiting to make the turn from Holden Street onto Main Street, we witnessed across the street on North Quinsigamond Ave,  first  a large burst of sparks from the top of one telephone pole, and then instantly a crash and explosion, as the next light pole collapsed into the street, taking down over 100 feet of live electrical wires which exploded as they slammed into the ground.    All of this occurred, as best as we could tell, with absolutely no apparent cause at all, although one person reports that the pole was hit by the white pickup truck at the scene.Live wires on the ground is always a bad scene as as they continued to spark and fizzle, onlookers kept pulling over to watch, which of course left them parked on the side of the road underneath all the wires.  Fortunately a few of the residents in the homes there, now trapped in their properties by the dangling high tension wires, were good enough to walk down and warn everyone to get out from under the lines, while I called the Police, and asked them to comes on out and bring along SELCO to shut down the wires.   They responded within minutes, and promptly sealed off the roadway, at which point the SELCO crew were able to get to work shutting down power and getting the new pole replaced.Up at Shrewsbury High School, power went out immediately, just as sports teams were beginning their afternoon workout schedule.  Shortly after things there went dark, the emergency power came on to supply at least limited lighting to the building, and things returned to at least some sense of normalcy.
Residents cars trapped behind the fallen wires....In the end, nobody was injured, and while the timing wasn’t great in terms of traffic nightmares, had it happened 15 minutes earlier as the bulk of the parents and school buses were existing the school grounds, it could very easily have been a disaster.  Nice work on the park of the emergency responders, doing today what they do every other day, and keeping us safe.As of 630PM, that intersection is still closed, but they do have the new pole in place.  Now it’s just a matter of moving the wires over.