LIFE WITH NO GAS TAKING TOLL ON LAWRENCE FAMILY
Hot plate becomes crucial for meals – and bath water
‘I wish that this was just a nightmare and that everything would be normal now. — YOHANNY CESPEDES
Yohanny Cespedes has to be up at 6 a.m. these days — half an hour earlier than before the gas explosions devastated her neighborhood and changed her life.
The Lawrence mom has to start boiling water on the hot plate early so she can bathe her three young children. But that inconvenience isn’t enough to resolve her many new problems.
“I was in my house yesterday morning and my daughter was cold. Her hands were so cold that I said to myself, ‘I have to leave, I can’t be here.’ So I called my sister and said, ‘Can you turn the heat on? I’m coming to your house.’ So we went to her house and slept on the floor because we wanted to be together,” Cespedes said.
Similar new morning rituals are playing out every day across a swath of Lawrence, North Andover and Andover, where as many as 8,000 households have no gas to heat their water, cook their food or warm their homes — with fall’s chill looming — two weeks after the blasts that killed one, injured dozens of others and threw the Merrimack Valley communities into chaos. They are weeks, possibly months, from seeing their service restored.
Cespedes let the Herald into her home yesterday to share her family’s experience.
A small business owner, Cespedes glides quickly around the kitchen in her apartment on Farnham Street with her 9-month-old daughter, Kianny Rivera, on her hip. In yesterday’s brief respite from fall weather, the thermostat on the wall read 68 degrees. Her living room is neatly organized with an orange couch and rug. Family photos hang on the wall and Spanish ballads play quietly from her phone. Cespedes has lived in Lawrence for 22 years after moving to the area from her native Dominican Republic when she was 19 years old.
Cespedes prepares oatmeal and bananas for Kianny — with water from the hot plate. She would usually be making huevos and platanos on the gas stove. The large silver pot of water rests on the hot plate she was given last week as she sits with Kianny and eats a bowl of cereal.
Cespedes likes to keep a clean household, and it is harder without hot water. She worries about her girls and her baby.
“We need to maintain a really clean environment for them. We worry about cleaning the baby’s bottles.
... They are little and can get sick easily,” she said.
National Guardsmen stopped by her house Tuesday and told her they couldn’t give her a space heater for her home because the electrical wiring is too old to support it. It would be a fire hazard.
“They said there’s nothing they can do,” she said.
Gov. Charlie Baker has promised people like Cespedes that Columbia Gas and the National Guard will “pursue alternative heating methods for unique homes that are not compatible with space heaters so that those affected can be as comfortable as possible as the short- and long-term construction effort.”
At 7 a.m., Cespedes disappears upstairs and returns with her 4-year-old daughter Kylee in her arms, half asleep. Ten minutes later, Cespedes comes back down again with 6-year-old Kourtney wrapped around her shoulder.
The girls make their way to the bathroom where a big orange bucket sits in the shower. Cespedes fills it with water warmed on the hot plate and bathes her children with it — quickly. The water cools down fast, she said.
The little ones aren’t blind to the recent changes.
The girls complain about having to stay at their grandmother’s house so often. They are getting tired of eating packaged foods. When the explosions happened and the electricity was cut, Cespedes said she had to throw out about $400 worth of groceries.
The family heads out the door and drives to Kourtney and Kylee’s school. Kianny is dropped off at her grandmother’s house in north Lawrence — an area untouched by the explosions.
Cespedes chats with the parents in the schoolyard, most of whom also lack heat and hot water.
“They’re mocking us,” Cespedes tells a friend in Spanish, referring to Columbia Gas.
Cespedes is far from satisfied with the company’s efforts, as are her friends.
“My question is, what are they going to do when the winter comes? It’s going to freeze,” she said, adding, “They say whatever we want to hear.”
Cespedes spends her day running her business, CCK Cleaning Services before picking up her daughters at 2:30 p.m. and taking them to her mother’s house for dinner.
The constant back-andforth is exhausting.
“I wish that this was just a nightmare and that everything would be normal now,” she said.