5,500 electric workers to mend Arkansas’ grid

Brandon Wilson, an employee of North Little Rock Electric, reconnects power to homes near West 36th and Gum streets in North Little Rock on Thursday.

Brandon Wilson, an employee of North Little Rock Electric, reconnects power to homes near West 36th and Gum streets in North Little Rock on Thursday.

Friday, December 28, 2012

— More than 5,500 workers with contractors from several states will work to restore electricity to hundreds of thousands Arkansans affected by a winter snowstorm that hit on Tuesday and Wednesday.

But how do those workers get the power back on?

The process can be tedious or relatively simple.

Crews for electric companies normally follow a predetermined strategy to restore power after major failures, said Rob Roedel, a spokesman for Arkansas Electric Cooperative Corp., which represents 17 electric cooperatives in the state. The cooperatives have about 500,000 customers.

First, they check highvoltage transmission towers and lines that supply power to transmission substations, Roedel said. The transmission towers and lines carry electricity from a power plant that generates the electricity.

Damage to the transmission lines or transmission substations can substantially delay the restoration process.

But damage to those lines occurs less frequently than at other points on the system because the wide rights of way normally prevent problems even if a large tree falls, said Brady Aldy, director of operations for Entergy Arkansas. There was some damage to these larger transmission lines this week, Aldy said.

Once the high-voltage lines are secure, crews next examine local distribution substations, which serve thousands of customers each, and make repairs there.

Making repairs at those distribution substations can restore service to the most customers, said Jill Ponder, energy services manager for the North Little Rock Electric Department.

Next, crews look for problems at main distribution supply lines, Roedel said. And finally they check supply lines that carry power to utility poles or underground transformers outside houses or buildings.

If all power is not restored at this point to some customers, crews check failures reported by individual customers, Ponder said.

One step out of the ordinary taken this week by First Electric Cooperative of Jacksonville was to hire helicopters to survey trouble spots, Roedel said.

“They surveyed their lines with helicopters because you can very quickly assess damage that way and then develop a work plan,” he said.

The most common cause of failures is trees falling and hitting lines, according to information he cooperatives’ posted online.

Entergy Arkansas begins its repair process by sending out engineering technicians to make general assessments about problems, such as how many trees have fallen in a general area and how many utility poles are down, Aldy said.

Then crews will start the restoration by grounding the system to protect workers, Aldy said. Next, tree crews physically remove trees with chain saws and haul out the debris.

Then the lines are restored and new poles are erected, he said.

Roedel said that repairing problems caused by one fallen tree can take two hours or more.

“If a tree is fallen across a line, we have to remove the tree,” he said. “Then we inspect the structural damage and correct that before we re-energize the line. If we have to replace the utility pole and restring the line, it can take 2.5 hours or more.”

Many times, customers report that transformers have blown out in their neighborhoods. But often, that is only a fuse that has blown out, Roedel said.

“It sounds like a shotgun going off,” he said. “That fuse is designed, like a fuse in a breaker box at a home, to flip the breaker if it gets a surge.”

A crew member can replace the fuse, which isn’t as time-consuming as making repairs from a fallen tree, Roedel said.

“That is part of the manual process,” he said. “With the technology today, with a [global positioning system] and our electronic systems, we can pinpoint where outages are, for the most part. But it ultimately takes someone going down the line and correcting discrepancies. It could be a blown fuse, a tree on a power line, it could be a damaged pole. But a crew has to go down the line and replace what’s gone wrong.”

Crews work around the clock to make repairs, Roedel said. Spotlights are used if necessary at night.

Aldy said that by the end of the week, Entergy Arkansas, which has about 700,000 customers in the state, will have more than 5,000 workers who have worked to repair problems on electric lines.

There were more than 500 workers repairing damage this week on lines with Arkansas Electric Cooperative members, with those workers now focusing on lines owned by First Electric Cooperative, Roedel said.

The North Little Rock Electric Department had about two dozen workers restoring power to the 10,000 customers who lost power in this week’s storm, Ponder said.

Southwestern Electric Power Co. also reported many power failures this week in the western part of the state.

All utilities with storm damage keep the Arkansas Public Service Commission, the state utility regulator, apprised of the extent of the problems, Roedel said.

Business, Pages 21 on 12/28/2012