Electricity Restored to Riverside Middle School

The power is back on at Riverside Middle School in East Providence. The school will reopen Tuesday morning, Sept. 24, at the usual time. 

Ed Catelli, director of facilities for the East Providence schools, said power was restored Monday afternoon after electricity was off for approximately 24 hours. The school was closed all day Monday.

“We had 30 to 40 guys out there working on this,” Catelli said, referring to National Grid.

Conduit that is approximately 6 feet underground and runs exclusively to the school had to be replaced, he said. A transformer that exploded also was replaced. So were the lines up the pole.

The transformer blew while the lines were being tested. No one was hurt, but Catelli said it was like fireworks in the sky.

“I thought for a minute it was the worst,” he said, referring to a repairman.

He did say that the anticipated problem was worse than expected and that repairs would take quite a few hours.

The lost school day will probably be made up at the end of the year, said Superintendent Kim Mercer.

There did not appear to be any power outages off of school property. But there also appeared to be some confusion with National Grid about the outage.

Media spokesman David Graves said the utility had no record of anyone from Riverside calling in a power outage or any crews being dispersed to the neighborhood. The online power outage map never showed a loss of electricity either, he said.

Catelli said Monday that he was the person who called in the power outage to National Grid Sunday afternoon.