One year anniversary of the Aquidneck Island gas outage

NEWPORT, R.I. (WLNE) – Tuesday marks one year since the devastating Natural Gas outage on Aquidneck Island, that left thousands without heat or hot water for days in the dead of winter.

Since then, the state has released a report on what went wrong, and National Grid says they’ve worked to prevent the outage from happening again. 

The outage impacted more than 7,100 National Grid customers on the island.

“When we first got the word from National Grid that gas was going to be cut off from thousands of Newport homes, it was the the coldest night of the year,” Newport Mayor Jamie Bova said. 

It not only impacted residents but some businesses were impacted by the outage too. Some even going without cash flow for almost a week and others suffering damage to their buildings from pipes bursting.

“He’s lost his business and he’s lost his heart,” Karl Nurse, the building manager of Water Brothers Surf Shop said. “He lost years and years and years of building his business and it was gone in a couple of hours.”

In November, the State Division of Public Utilities and Carriers released their report on the outage saying a valve malfunction, system failure, and high demand contributed to it. 

“This is an under pressure issue from the gas transmission line into our system,” Rhode Island’s President of National Grid Tim Horan said.

Governor Raimondo said then that she’s looking to pass a law that would hold National Grid accountable if a mass outage were to happen again. 

“The ratepayers in the State of Rhode Island will not and should not have to bear the cost for their mistakes,” Gov. Raimondo said. “The people of Aquidneck Island, the people of Rhode Island, deserve affordable, reliable, resilient energy and electricity.”

In the report there were recommendations for National Grid to take.

National Grid claims to have already implemented most of them but the Governor has directed the state to work more closely with the company.