The INDEPENDENT, February 1, 2012
Page 13
Power of the People
By W. Marc Farmer, General Manager,
West Oregon Electric Cooperative
Mother Nature Wins Again
While we had a pretty good reprieve in 2011, once again
Mother Nature has reminded us who is in charge. The snow
storm event started for us on Sunday, the 15th, when we
rolled out our first crews to fix some small outages in the
Hamlet and Necanicum areas. The problems continued
throughout the day on Monday as the snow kept coming
down and piling up. We had tree issues in the Elsie area and
out to Camp 18 during the day, then things started to spread
out into Moores Valley and Apiary Road.
I guess you can say that on Tuesday all heck broke loose, as the snow became
wet, deep, and heavy. Outages spread throughout our system and we started con-
tacting other utilities and contractors to bring in some additional crews to help us
out. Normally, we have been able to immediately get help from our neighbors
Clatskanie PUD, Columbia River PUD, and Forest Grove. This year, they were hit
hard with snow damage, as well, so could not respond to our call until they were
done getting their own systems back in service. Even electric cooperatives within
a reasonable distance away who have helped us out in past storm events could
not respond, as they were having snow, freezing rain, wind, and flooding issues
themselves. We were fortunate, through our good working relationships, to be able
to secure some contract crews before they were all taken by other utilities in Ore-
gon and Washington who were also having major issues.
Starting on Tuesday we had all of our crews, contract crews, tree crews, and
some neighboring crews working around the clock to assess damage and begin
the arduous task of restoring power. We had outages throughout our 1,224 mile
system, and the heavy snow was breaking limbs, trees, cross arms, and even a
power pole. We were making some progress until just after midnight, when things
went from bad to worse. We lost both the transmission line from Chapman to Ver-
nonia and the transmission line from Timber to Vernonia, due to large trees from
outside our right of way. The snow kept piling up and creating more tree problems,
even overloading lines due to the sheer weight of it. We called in more crews, as
we could tell this was going to be a long and difficult task, with outages continuing
to expand throughout our entire service area.
When we have large outages, we go through a process of restoring power to
the largest number of members first and working our way from there. We start with
the most vital aspects of the power system, the substations and transmission lines,
and work out from there to feeder lines, then distribution lines and finally individual
tap lines to individual homes. With the transmission lines down, we had to redirect
assets to getting them back up as a priority. The transmission line from Timber to
Vernonia was the first priority, but just before we were finished repairing the line,
BPA called to inform us that they had lost power to the Timber substation. This
meant that even though we were ready to restore power to the Vernonia area by
late morning, we had no power to the substation to deliver. Power was finally re-
stored from BPA by early evening to the Timber substation.
Now, some education and information for our members, so that you can better
understand why it takes time to restore power through the system. It is not as easy
as just throwing a switch and having everyone back in service. In winter we must
go through a process called a cold load pickup. When the system has been down
for a while, it gets cold like everything else and must be heated back up. The sub-
stations are heated up first, then the transmission lines. The feeder lines that come
out of the substations are third in the process, but can only be heated up in sec-
tions, in order to handle the huge loads that will be placed on them. When a sec-
tion of line is energized and heated back up, all of the homes on that line immedi-
ately place load on the line. As members turn on lights, turn up heat, water heaters
cycle on to heat up the water in the tanks, doing laundry and dishes, cooking, turn-
ing on the television and all of the other uses, it puts a tremendous, instant load all
at once on the lines. If we turned up the whole system at once, the resulting instant
load would overload the system and cause it to crash. Turning it up section by sec-
tion allows us to heat the lines up, balance the load, and then bring on the next
section in an organized manner that will keep the restored sections going instead
of bringing it all back down. Doing it this way is why you see sections of town light
up before others.
Another process we go through is to patrol each line and segment, before it is
energized, to make sure that there are not any limbs or trees on the line, or any
breaks in the line that would cause the line to go back out or burn it up. It takes
time to patrol each line, so some shorter segments, or easier to see and patrol sec-
tions will come on quicker than others. For example, during this last storm we were
asked why Anderson Park and Pebble Creek were restored last after the rest of
town was on.
The Pebble
Creek feeder
line
goes
through and
feeds Ander-
son Park and
is the longest
of the lines to
patrol. It natu-
rally
takes
longer, then,
to patrol this
line before it
can be ener-
gized, so it
comes on last
of the feeder
lines in the
Vernonia sub-
station. It was
a good thing
we did patrol
it first, as
there was a
very
large
tree on the
line, which, if
we had energized the line going across the river, would have burned through and
gone down. To repair this line across the river would have taken many hours, leav-
ing people on the line out for at least another day. Safety is another reason we pa-
trol lines first, and the safety of our crews is paramount.
When all was said and done, we had brought in over ten crews to work with us
and spent over $700,000 to put it all back in service and repair the damage. We
got the last members back on the following Sunday, but still had to bring in a con-
tract crew from BPA with special equipment to finish repairing the Chapman to Ver-
nonia transmission line, on Thursday the 26th. This will probably be declared a
FEMA event for Columbia County, where we had the majority of the damage. In
fact the Chapman area got hit the hardest.
We appreciate the patience and support that we receive from most of the mem-
bers. We do all we humanly and safely can to restore power as quickly as possi-
ble. When it gets too bad, like this snowstorm, we spare no expense to bring in as
much help as
we can to
help speed up
the amount of
work we can
accomplish.
At the end of
the
day,
though, we
are always at
the mercy of
Mother Na-
ture, and re-
main deeply
humbled by
the powerful
forces
we
face
every
winter from
winds, snow,
rains,
and
floods.
We
will
always
give
mem-
bers our best
efforts to re-
store
their
power.