This storm hit pretty hard and furious along coastal areas of Massachusetts during early 1958. It featured thick heavy snow that stuck to everything. The caked ice and snow placed a heavy burden on openwire electric and telephone openwire lines throughout the region. The extra weight of the lines often caused older pins to "sink" into their crossarms. That is, the old (rusty) nails that held them in place sometimes rotted away causing their insulators' bases to drop and sit on their crossarms. Sometimes older pins would snap off at their insulators' screw threads and cause the latter to rest sideways on their crossarms with the line wire often rubbing against the arm.

The Hingham, MA town-owned electric utility fared quite well during this storm. Above is a photo of a snow-clad pole, wires and a span-wire radial wave street light at the intersection of Massachusetts SR 228 (Main Street) and Pleasant Street, right after the snowstorm. The G.A.R. Hall is on the left and this street view has not changed very much since then (except for the poles and wires, of course..). The poles with their crossarms and wires remained exactly the way you see them until the town started their conversion to 13.8kv primary voltage in the late 1980s.

The late Stan Magner who worked for the Hingham Light Plant as a lineman for years said "we regularly would often go around town and patrol looking for broken insulator pins. We carried a pin bag on the back of the line truck for replacements. There were plenty waiting to be found out there, especially after storms. We also were on the lookout for hanging branches and limbs on the wires." Hingham has been famous for various species of big, majestic trees including elms.

Betterments that took place during 1958 included using steel pins exclusively for all line work. Also during that year, the town utility was among the first municipal to work with the Hendrix Wire and Cable Company (Milford, NH) in testing and using spacer cable for primary circuits. The "spreader" insulators used during these early years of Hendrix line construction were clear plastic in two sizes. In 1960 the Hingham utility specially ordered some in transparent green (photos of these will be shown in the near future) to blend with adjacent tree foliage. Using spacer cable in this community significantly reduced tree related outages and enabled their tree trimming crews to cut less from the town's loved and historic trees.

The new spacers were used on numerous primary circuits during the town's ongoing conversion that was pressing forward from 2,400 volts primary to 4,160. This enabled reliable and adequate supply in response to record postwar residential and commercial growth taking place from one end of town to the other.

Periodic transformer checks were also among the utility's regular maintenance activities, a program that began in 1894 when the Light Plant was founded. 24-hour recording instruments were employed in subsequent years. During 1958, 254 individual transformer tests took place in assuring proper equipment operation without overload or any other adverse conditions that might have been happening. Transformers found undersized were promptly replaced and upgraded to adequately meet new load requirements, providing better and more reliable service.