Dedham Selectmen Rail Against NSTAR [VIDEO]

and an left thousands in Dedham without power for days - and and residents about NSTAR's response poured in.

The Dedham Board of Selectmen had a chance to get debriefed on Feb. 9 about what happened during those storms that made them so damaging and plans moving forward.

"My uninformed observation is that the general level of condition of infrastructure in this town has declined over the years," selectman Michael Butler said. "The investment hasn't been kept up by the utility."

Since Irene, Richard Tobin, manager of emergency prepardness, said NSTAR has added personnel, updated its response procedures and taken advice on how to communicate better with residents and officials.

NSTAR has added more community liasons to keep police and fire chiefs and other town officials in the loop during a storm, and will add more call center employees to field outage reports from customers, according to officials.

"The communication [...] from our 911 dispatch to NSTAR was almost non-existent. Nobody knew what was going on," selectman Jim MacDonald said. "We can't have our public safety people out there in jeopardy."

Instead of one community liason handling dozens of towns, NSTAR will deploy more than 80 liasons to handle two-to-four towns apiece during an event.

Tobin said the company is working on building an online portal that towns can access for information during a storm - but as of now, that system won't be ready until June and won't be able to handle communication from towns until 2013.

"That's unacceptable," Jim MacDonald said. "This is something that shouldn't be taking, in my opinion, a year to develop. [...] Waiting until next year is going to be too late."

NSTAR blamed many of the outages on tree limbs that crashed onto wires and uprooted trees that pulled down power lines. Since the storms, Tobin said the company has worked to clear tree branches and identify at-risk trees.

"We had rain leading up to [Irene]. The ground was saturated. The damage that was caused by these events weren't from tree limbs breaking above our lines - although some of that happened. The most catastrophic damage were trees uprooting and falling outside the trim-zone," Tobin said.

Utility officials are working on workflows with towns to establish plans for the most critical roads, and create procedures around balancing restoration effors and making an area safe before restoration.

"That act of restoring takes more time than it takes to do a make-safe," said Tobin.