Columbia Gas pulls back $33M hike request
Columbia Gas withdrew its request to increase gas distribution rates by $33 million yesterday, the same day they put boots on the ground to begin replacing the entire natural gas distribution system in the Merrimack Valley.
The gas company wants to “focus exclusively on service restoration and customer assistance” and “relieve customers of any impact of a base-rate change that would layer onto the burden of long-term service distributions and outages.”
Columbia Gas in April asked to hike rates by $44.5 million and earlier this month agreed with Attorney General Maura Healey’s office to cut back its request to $33.2 million. Comments on that settlement agreement with Healey’s office were due yesterday.
After a gas line malfunction killed one person and injured over two dozen others a week ago, the gas company said its “resources and management focus are entirely subsumed in service restoration efforts and in efforts to assist customers.”
Meanwhile, Columbia Gas is working in collaboration with the governor’s office and stakeholders to replace the entire affected 48-mile cast-iron and bare steel pipeline system in the towns of Andover, Lawrence and North Andover with stateof-the-art plastic distribution mains and service lines, and safety features such as pressure regulation and excess flow valves at each premise.
Crews were working on preliminary repairs and staging equipment to replace portions of natural gas pipeline in the greater Lawrence area yesterday, including Osgood and Andover streets, Kingston and Newton streets, and Brookfield and Broadway streets between Lennox and Chester streets.
“This preliminary work will help expedite pipeline replacement for a limited portion of the gas line in the affected area, and is not part of the long-term restoration efforts,” the statement said.
A small portion of residents may have gas service restored in the coming days, including people who live on Bowdoin and Jefferson streets, and Columbia Gas will reach out to those customers to notify them. Officials and the gas company continue to warn residents not to attempt to turn on their gas services.