Mayor is grandstanding. Where is NStar going to get the money. Raise our rates? They are right. The businesses should have gotten insurance for this type of loss.

how bout they take it out of Tom May's 8 million dollar annual salary.

The initial connector failure could reasonably be described as a mechanical failure. The fact that a single connector failure could result in a transformer fire, then cascading failures across the Back Bay, South End and Theater District is not simply a mechanical failure but inept network design and management. I'd call it negligence, or incompetence. Certainly not a normal outage, as Mr. May claims.

Why do I have a funny feeling that if Mr. Hobo ran NStar, we'd see outages like this on a regular basis? Maybe because he so blithely dismisses the complexity of engineering power systems and feels he can call the utility inept? By the way, May claimed this was a most unusual outage, quite the opposite of "normal".

Mayor is grandstanding? Good Mayor Menino? I am shocked, shocked, that one could make such an assertion. /redundancy alert...

Time to get a new provider, I guess. After all, it's a free market- oh wait. There's no choice. Can we fire Thomas May? You know, vote him out, like democratically? Oh wait, we don't have any say over that either. So it ain't exactly capitalism, and it ain't democratic. 0 for 2 ain't so bad I guess.

Or take it out of stockholders' dividends. Of course, ALL their money comes from ratepayers, including May's income.

"We do not..." Tom May likes the phrase, "We do not..." He used it repeatedly in this article. Of course, when there's a blizzard or hurricane, he can claim that it's not his company's fault. But he can't claim that when it's a piece of his companies equipment that fails. Ah, but he DOES claim it's not his responsibility. Maybe he should have some other We-Do-Not's: "We do not accept responsibility for anything." "We do not meet initial repair estimates." "We do not meet subsequent repair estimates." "We do not feel customers are something we should be overly concerned with." We DO recommend that everyone carry insurance to cover our incompetence."

Entropic -- Mr Hobo makes a good point and you sound more like an apologist. In a properly hardened system no single point failure should have caused such widespread damage. Transformer explosions, while not "common", are not extremely rare. Yet in this instance a transformer explosion took down a second transformer in close proximity -- something that could have been easily avoided. I'm very familiar with systems that use redundancy to provide a near fail-safe environment. There is very little redundancy in the electric grid, and it will never be there without government intervention. The free market doesn't do a very good job with the nation's infrastructure without heavy regulation.

City people need a reality check. Power in most places goes out from time to time. When I was a kid it went out quite a bit. I have a generator at my house and it sees some occasional use every few years. That the Back Bay hasn't had a serious power failure in decades is, in and of itself, quite an accomplishment. People expecting 100 percent grid reliability are going to be disappointed.