Want Ice with That?
Lineworkers Grapple with Mother Nature
“I’ve been called everything but a swell guy,” said the weary co-op manager as a heavy snowfall gradually melted away. The patience of some co-op members had melted a lot faster: Thanks to the bad behavior heavy snow can cause in overhead wires, line crews in some areas had restored service only to have circuits trip off again minutes later.
There are those whose weather preferences favor the American Southwest over Wisconsin, which is another way of saying not everyone enjoys variety. It’s the variety—and sometimes the rapid variability—of weather in the Upper Midwest that can trigger real frustration for co-op members who might be unfamiliar with the tricks nature will pull, unraveling the best of efforts to put a damaged electrical system back in service.
The Big Chill
“Some of the things you see ice do just blow your mind,” said Garry Christopherson, director of safety and security for Dairyland Power. Part of his job at the La Crosse, Wisconsin-based generation and transmission cooperative is to coordinate the ROPE program.
ROPE is the acronym for Restoration of Power in Emergency and Christopherson’s role is to help match up cooperatives that can spare a line crew for a few days with their storm-damaged neighbors—in a neighborhood covering several states—to get members back in service as quickly and safely as possible.
“I’ve seen it where it got so cold the stuff wouldn’t come off and you literally have to beat the ice off the wire and you can only get about a foot at a time,” Christopherson told Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News in a January interview. “In a lighter freeze it might fall off on its own, but in 40-foot lengths, and then the wire starts to gallop.”
“Galloping conductor” could be politely called an annoyance for line workers who spend long hours laboring in cold, wet, windy conditions. When a load of ice lets go, the wire will snap upward and has a good chance of contacting another wire and shorting out the circuit. If that happens soon after power has been restored, a co-op member sitting in his suddenly re-darkened home may be making sour remarks about the line crew and reaching for a telephone to give the manager a piece of his mind.
Ice and cold have additional ways of hamstringing restoration efforts. A December 1, 2005, blizzard that punished South Dakota piled snow drifts as high as 10 feet and ended with freezing rain that left a two-inch coating on utility equipment. The storm wreaked havoc on 30 electric cooperatives and took down transmission lines as well as the smaller distribution lines more commonly affected.
Christopherson recounted how workers struggling to get the all-important transmission system back up and running were repeatedly thwarted by a combination of old wire, the weight of ice, and bitter cold making the wire more difficult to work with.
“Every time they’d pull it up the old wire would break,” he said.
Lovely, White, and Anything But Light
Snow doesn’t weigh as much as the same volume of ice, but it can do the same things to power lines. When an unseasonably early storm dumped as much as a foot of snow across the northern half of Wisconsin last November 8, a high moisture content kept lots of the white stuff clinging to overhead lines.
General Manager Bruce Ardelt of Oakdale Electric Cooperative told Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News the problem was widespread but uneven. “When I started out for the office the lines were clean and by the time I’d driven a little less than a mile, the snow accumulated on the wires in that area was about eight inches in diameter,” he said.
Where accumulations were that large, he said, the lines would sag downward. Later—in some cases just minutes after service had been restored—snow would drop off and, relieved of the extra weight, the wire would fly upwards, strike another wire, and trip off the circuit.
Members of Adams–Columbia and Central Wisconsin electric cooperatives were affected by the same problem. Jon Gessner, Adams-Columbia manager of operations, told us, “We were out there that first day putting lines back on, but the next day things started to warm up and we went from 1,000 people without power to 3,000 within half an hour.”
“It’s relatively nice weather. The sun is shining. People think everything is fixed and reset their clocks,” Gessner says. “And then they’re saying, ‘I’m out again? The storm is long gone; why’s it out again?’”
“And I’m frustrated too,” he adds, “because we have to send guys back to the same area a second time.”
Adams–Columbia System Engineer Dave Ziarnik pointed out that in addition to wires leaping up from below, objects falling from above raise the threat of repeated outages on the same stretch of line, especially if a heavy snowfall is followed—as they frequently are—by a rising barometer and brisk winds.
“A similar situation could be when the linemen repair a line only to hear a loud crack as another branch or tree succumbs to the weight of the snow and takes the line out again,” Ziarnik said, adding, “Wind can compound the problem.”
The Wayward Wind
“With ice, at least when the wire falls down you can find it,” says Garry Christopherson. But just to begin the recovery from a windstorm, more steps may be required. “When a high wind goes through, you get a tangled mess,” he says.
Oftentimes line crews have to find the downed wire before they can start disentangling it from debris, and much debris may need to be cleared before the wire can be reached.
Last September 2, straight-line winds gusting to the lower range of hurricane strength lashed a wide area of Wisconsin. The storm lingered no more than half an hour at any given location but even with crews from nine cooperatives participating, it took a week to fully restore power.
Adams–Columbia had the most extensive damage and CEO Marty Hillert—whose co-op, along with several others from Wisconsin, provided critical rebuilding assistance after Hurricane Katrina—reported that veterans of the Louisiana relief project said last September’s storm caused “similar damage—only without the water, just the wind.”
American Transmission Company, the independent grid operator for most of Wisconsin, sustained damage to its system in that same storm and found its restoration work complicated by the fact that, ironically, some of its personnel were out of state, dispatched to the East Coast where they were assisting with reconstruction in the wake of an actual hurricane, Irene.
The abundance of trees and vegetation in most cooperative service areas helps make a persuasive argument for vigorous brush-clearing and tree-trimming programs, Dairyland’s Christopherson says.
“Cutting trees is a sore subject for a lot of people,” he concedes. On the other hand, he says, members become more favorable toward right-of-way maintenance when they find through experience that it can make the difference between getting their power back on quickly after a windstorm and possibly waiting a few days.
Not Always the Weather
Last September’s storm and one earlier in the season had more than destructive winds in common. Each struck on the eve of a holiday weekend, compounding the difficulty of repairs.
It wasn’t that people were away from their jobs. When winds tore apart co-op systems in northwest Wisconsin on the night of July 1, crews from 13 distribution cooperatives put aside their Independence Day weekend plans. The problem was where to house the crews in the hours they weren’t working.
Christopherson told us even more co-ops were prepared to help, but holiday weekend travelers had already booked most of the area’s motel rooms. The situation repeated itself in September, with high demand for motel accommodations during the Labor Day weekend.
It’s been worse. A few years ago ROPE assistance to Cresco, Iowa-based Hawkeye Tri-County Electric Cooperative following an ice storm was curtailed because without power in the extreme cold, co-op members had no choice but to come into town and stay in motels, leaving no place to put borrowed line crews. In the 2005 South Dakota blizzard the problem was finally solved by an emergency declaration from the governor, opening up high-school gyms as dormitories for aid workers.
As Christopherson put it, “You can’t have guys out working 10, 12 hours in the cold and then make them sleep in their trucks.” Besides the comfort factor, there’s the potentially deadly effect of fatigue on people whose lives depend on doing their work without mistakes. “This is a hazardous job and working in hazardous conditions, often at night, adds to that and also adds time when you’re restoring power,” Adams–Columbia’s Gessner told us. “We have to keep our employees safe.”—story by Dave Hoopman; photos: Keith Wohlfert, Adams–Columbia Electric; Richard Biever, Electric Consumer; John Lowery, Illinois Country Living; Nancy Hatcher, Pioneer REC |
