National Grid executives appeared before the Select Board Wednesday following the Christmas Stroll power outage in downtown Nantucket, but have not yet explained the cause of the 27-hour outage that has cost island businesses millions in lost revenue.

The utility had previously determined that the problem was that two sections of underground power cable along South Water Street were broken and needed to be replaced. However, it may take weeks or even longer to figure out how and why the error occurred.

“There are cases where we can immediately tell when something is happening, and sometimes it’s really obvious because you see a vehicle hit a pole or an animal come into contact,” said Shaun Vacher, vice president of National Grid . “This is much more demanding. There were no obvious signs of anything, so we cut out these sections of cable, sent them to our lab and ran tests there. It’s kind of like a…” The autopsy will hopefully shed light on whether it’s manufacturing, our own installation processes, or whether environmental conditions occurred. This analysis will take a few weeks if we can’t find anything out. Our own internal analysis, there are third party companies that we can also send these cable sections to see if they can discover anything.

Vacher apologized for the outage and told the Select Board that National Grid has closely monitored the performance of all of its underground power cables since 2000 and that in the 24 years since then there have only been seven outages along the downtown cable that failed Christmas Walk .

“What happened this weekend is the only time there has been a problem in this section,” Vacher said.

Pete Burke, executive director of the Nantucket Island Chamber of Commerce, said his organization is currently studying affected downtown businesses to assess the extent of their financial losses. Of the more than 200 businesses that lost power, 50 had completed the survey as of Wednesday evening and reported a loss in revenue of more than $1.3 million. This number is expected to increase as more companies participate in the survey.

Burke also addressed National Grid’s rapid denial of claims from companies for losses caused by the outage.

“The claims part of this is obviously frustrating because some people have filed claims,” Burke said. “So if there is an understanding or a commitment to it, we need human intervention. We can’t let the robot claim, come back and say, ‘Hey, it’s rejected because it doesn’t meet these parameters.’ This is a very specific situation. And if the cause of the failure has not yet been determined, how can the claim be rejected or accepted if the forensic work on the line has not yet been carried out? are committed to responding to their members who were affected by the outage by saying, “Hey, we have a timeline for these claims or a way to get all of our information”https://nantucketcurrent.com/news/ .”

Vacher emphasized that National Grid is already planning an $8 million investment in downtown Nantucket’s electrical infrastructure, which he said would help prevent similar outages in the future.

“We are not waiting for the cable to fail before we find a solution to it,” he said. “The solution we are implementing addresses a redundancy/resiliency issue. If something happens, we can restore customers very quickly; “This is not because the cable is obsolete, and we expect these issues to continue to occur.”