Canton School Shut Down After Manhole Blast Cuts Power to 4,000

A manhole explosion near Hampstead Hill Academy in Canton knocked out power to roughly 4,000 customers and forced the closure of the Baltimore charter school on Wednesday, just the third day of the new academic year. Baltimore City Fire Department crews responded around 7:30 a.m. to the 500 block of South Streeper Street near Fleet Street, where they found underground smoke but no visible flames, and reported no injuries.

The manhole sits about a block from the school, at South Streeper and Fleet streets, according to WBAL News Radio. Video from the area showed a displaced manhole cover and a dark, gooey substance inside, and the incident knocked out power to Hampstead Hill Academy itself. Fire crews secured the area before clearing utility workers to move in and inspect the damage, per WBAL Radio.

Baltimore City Fire officials directed the school closure out of an abundance of caution, and the cause of the incident remains under investigation. School officials expect Hampstead Hill Academy to reopen for normal operations Thursday.

Power Restored, but Questions Linger Over Who's Responsible

Baltimore Gas and Electric officials said crews restored service to about 4,000 customers after tracing the outage to an underground cable fault, with power restored to most customers before noon. BGE clarified that while it operates the electrical cables, the City of Baltimore owns and maintains the underground conduit network and is responsible for determining what actually caused the blast, the station's report notes.

That division of responsibility has become a familiar refrain in Baltimore. Under the city's underground infrastructure arrangement, the City of Baltimore owns and maintains the physical conduit system while BGE simply leases space inside it to run electric cable, according to CBS News. Baltimore City Department of Public Works records show the block surrounding the school — bounded by Eastern Avenue, S. Linwood Avenue, Fleet Street, and S. Streeper Street — had previously been designated for municipal utility installation and right-of-way work.

A School Built on More Than a Century of History

Hampstead Hill Academy was originally founded in 1880 as Public School #47 and has operated as a neighborhood public charter school managed by the non-profit Baltimore Curriculum Project since 2005, according to the Baltimore Curriculum Project. The school serves roughly 930 Pre-K through 8th-grade students drawn heavily from surrounding southeast Baltimore neighborhoods, and it was the sole Baltimore City public school to earn a 5-star rating on the Maryland State Department of Education report card in 2025, per Live Baltimore.

Wednesday's closure landed during the opening week of the 2026–2027 school year for Baltimore City Public Schools, which officially began classes on Monday, creating an abrupt childcare scramble for families barely settled into the new routine.

Part of a Recurring Pattern Beneath Baltimore's Streets

This is not an isolated event for a city that has weathered a string of underground electrical failures in recent years. A December 2025 municipal investigation into Baltimore's underground fires found that manhole explosions occur when combustible gases build up and ignite around failing electrical cables inside the city's conduits, city leaders having commissioned independent engineering studies after a series of major downtown blasts.

In January 2024, underground electrical fires and manhole blasts in downtown Baltimore darkened multiple blocks, forced evacuations, and briefly disrupted the city's 911 dispatch communications, according to the Baltimore City Mayor's Office. Firefighters that time had to wait for utility crews to de-energize equipment before they could extinguish the flames. Months later, a September 2024 underground fire near North Charles Street blew a manhole cover into five pieces, injured a firefighter, and cut power to thousands of downtown residents and businesses, per FireRescue1, which reported that equipment recovered from the manholes spanned nearly a century of infrastructure. Hoodline previously reported on the findings behind those recurring blasts, tying them to gas buildup in the city's aging conduit system.

For now, families near Hampstead Hill Academy are left waiting on two separate investigations to determine what exactly went wrong beneath their street — one from the utility that lost power to thousands, and one from the city that owns the pipes underneath it all.