|
|
Doug Bechtel
|
|
Did you reach for your kerosene lamp weekend before last? I did. I was so sure that the forecast of 70 to 90 MPH winds was really going to hit us. I drove the people at OPALCO crazy as I looked over their shoulders as they made preparations in case the storm hit us. I was extra worried because of all the recent rains which had softened the ground and weakened the support for our trees.
In spite of my worrying, I was confident that we would not be hit as hard as in the past. I figured in the worst case, we would be looking at three to four days to get power back on - not the 10 or more days it has taken in the past. The truth of the matter is that our storm abatement program has done a great job of reducing power outages caused by high winds. I don't want to ignore or make short of the great inconvenience to those whose power lines are still overhead and still suffer outages. We will get to you. In the meantime, you are still benefitting from this program because our crews are able to get to you and restore power far faster than would be the case otherwise.
I am also leery of bragging about how reliable our system has been over the last two years -Mother Nature has a way of getting even with those who challenge her.
Our storm abatement program has been effective. We initially identified about 70 miles of overhead lines that needed to be buried to reduce future storm damage. We are paying for this program with a 1/4 cent per kWh surcharge on our electric bills plus some grant funds that we were able to get. Altogether, we expect to spend $2,500,000 burying these lines. The surcharge was instituted in March of 1991 and is scheduled to end in February of 1996. Our collections have been very close to our original projections and we continue to plan on ending the surcharge in 1996. Our construction has been slower than ex-pected for several reasons. Even though our collections will end in 1996, we expect continuing construction for a few years after the surcharge ends.
Each year your Board of Directors goes through a formal review of the storm abatement program. Looking at the jobs accomplished, funds spent, and how we are tracking with our original plans, I think that the results we have seen so far exceed our expec-tations. We do have to remember, however, that we have been doing the worst storm areas first and are now getting to the slightly less urgent areas.
To get back to my original theme, the winds did not hit us as badly as expected but we did have several outages. Almost without exception these outages were in areas scheduled for conversion to underground in the future.
Next time (if I don't get sidetracked), I want to talk about some other outages we have had, particularly the long outage we had on Lopez and San Juan February 14th.
Doug Bechtel
|