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Comment by freerobby | Hacker News Reader

Andover resident here. The local response has been super impressive. I've never seen so many emergency response vehicles and personnel mobilized so quickly from so many different places.

We drove north to New Hampshire on instinct as soon as we had a sense of what was happening (about an hour before the formal evacuation), and saw police and firetrucks heading south the entire way. After dinner, on our way back south (not home, but to another place to stay tonight), all the highway exits in the affected areas were closed, with police at each exit offering guidance to drivers who weren't sure what to do or where to go.

The affected communities are suburban -- not in the boonies, but not urban either, and definitely not used to having to respond so urgently to a widespread problem like this. They appear to have been very well trained and ready for it.

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This is heartwarming to hear, and not surprising from my experience. Although people are great at minding their own matters in the greater Boston metro and beyond in non-crisis situations, when folks need help, this is a great place to get that help.

>Although people are great at minding their own matters in the greater Boston metro and beyond

No. They are very much are not. Massachusetts people are busybodies compared to people farther north. They very much care about things that others do that don't effect them. It's been this way since Boston was founded in the 1600s and it's deeply ingrained in the culture. I didn't notice it until I lived in northern New England for awhile.

What he means, I assume, is that Massachusetts people are very "cold" compared to people in the South or on the West Coast in the sense that strangers are very unlikely to greet you or chat you up. It always weirds me out when people start doing that but visitors to this area complain about the opposite.

I'll agree with that.

Nobody will talk to you on the subway. Everybody will be very interested on whether your replacement garage door "fits the character of the neighborhood" though. If your kid gets off the bus and lets themselves into the house before you show up from work you are going to get really familiar with the local cops.

My favorite two anecdotes:

I once drove ~1/2mi home after getting a flat (in the tires' defense, it was older than me), mid-morning on a weekday. Less than 5min later, while I was in the middle of "screw these used pieces of shit, I'm ordering all new Firestones on Amazon" the cops, knocked on my door. Turns out someone had followed me home and then called me in to the cops as a possible drunk driver, on a weekday morning. And the cops were happy to oblige. They had no problem showing up and playing the questions game with me over a call they would have ignored in NH or ME.

Back when I was in middle school (decades ago) my parents got lectured by the school about how they were raising me because I kept getting in trouble for using pads of sticky notes to make short animations of car crashes, explosions, and other typical action movie stuff.

If those aren't hallmarks of a society that think's it's perfectly fine to get unnecessarily involved in someone else's problems then I don't know what is.

That seems like a phenomenon of upper-class neighborhoods. My neighbor has a roof with a bunch of missing shingles and has put a tarp instead of fixing it; I doubt anyone is that bothered what I do if it's not crazy.

Try letting a kid play in the backyard unsupervised for 15 minutes and get back to us.

You hear these stories all over the country. It's a sickness but I'm not pinning it on Massachusetts specifically.

> Back when I was in middle school (decades ago) my parents got lectured by the school about how they were raising me because I kept getting in trouble for using pads of sticky notes to make short animations of car crashes, explosions, and other typical action movie stuff.

You have to admit they were on to something though, here you are writing stuff on a forum for scary hackers.

I know someone from the area and she says the impression is Columbia Gas willfully ignored the situation in Lawrence, the poorer of the suburbs, than Andover and the more affluent adjacent towns. Accurate assessment?

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