November 9, 1965 was the darkest day in the electrical industry (no pun intended). Most of the northeastern United States blacked out starting between 5PM and 5:30PM that day at dusk. The problem originated at a major generation facility at Niagara Falls, NY. A plant at that location tripped and so did most others in the forementioned region, including New York City, as in a domino-effect, going down like a deck of cards.

Other than two or three municipally-owned electric utilities here in Massachusetts who had their own generation facilities and who were able to disconnect from the electrical disturbances that took place on the big-grid (if they were connected to it) the Hingham, MA system went down with everyone else. At that time power for the town was purchased from the New England Electric System via several stations connecting to them.

The Hingham Light Plant's two-line phone system was totally jammed with outage calls all evening. A retired employee said "As soon as you put the phone down it would instantly ring again....sometimes when we got tired we would pick up the phone and simply say "we know your lights are out and can't say when they will be back on."

The late Tom Halpin is shown here in the engineering office at the Hingham utility believed to have been taking calls and dispatching to crews in the field ready to safely reconnect to the New England Power 13.8 and 23kv interfaces at the town's substations.

The (late) Clyde H. Curtis was the Light Plant's general manager [id=632013282]. During the 1965 blackout, Mr. Curtis and Mr. Halpin supervised crews to re-energize the town's several incoming substations upon notification by the power grid's coordination office. Hingham Light substation engineers Dwight Mayo and James Powers responded to switching orders as power to assure electricity was safely turned back on.

As generation plants were able to one-by-one boot up again late that evening, the majority of southeastern MA was back in the light again.