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Forgetting 1995 for a minute, however, I do have four major issues that I plan to tackle in 1996. The first of these - and probably the most noticeable - is the number of power outages that OPALCO experiences. During 1995, we had a total of 252 outages. 33,000 members were affected (obviously, some of you had more than one outage). Collectively, we spent over 100,000 hours without power. Each of us averaged ten hours without power - much of this was planned, some was unplanned. If you spent less than ten hours without power (as most of us did), remember that there was someone else who was without power for more than ten hours. I don't have an easy way to figure out who has the dubious record of the most power outages, but I do know the areas of each island that are hit the worst. On San Juan Island, the West Side and Sunset Point areas have more than their share of outages. On Orcas, it is Pole Pass and the Buckhorn areas. On Lopez, it is the south end, Hughes Bay and Port Stanley areas. Shaw has Neck Point. Center Island has the most problems of the non-ferry islands. We have projects in 1996 that will improve (although not necessarily fix) the situation in most of these areas. The largest single cause of outages was trees and limbs getting tangled up in our overhead power lines, accounting for nearly 40% of the outages that we experienced. The bad news is that well over three-quarters of these outages were caused by trees and limbs from areas outside of our rights of way. The next largest source of outages was bad underground wire. This amounted to about 25% of our outages. While we are working hard to replace the underground wires in areas that we know are bad, it is a terribly expensive operation, and there never seems to be enough money to replace all the bad underground that needs it. We keep working on it and in a few years, we hope to start making progress on reducing the number of underground outages. The remaining 35% of our outages come from a broad spectrum ranging from overloaded transformers to small rodents climbing up on our transformers to keep warm to the great "unknown" outages, where we can't find anything wrong, and everything is OK when we turn the power back on. One area that accounted for over a dozen of our outages last year was failures of lightning arrestors. Even though our system doesn't have much of a lightning problem, we use these arrestors to protect our underground conductors and the rest of our system from voltage spikes. I don't know of any way to test or analyze these arrestors to find out why they are failing or, more importantly, find them before they fail. During 1996, we are going to take steps to significantly reduce the number of outages we experience. Over the next couple of OPALCOGRAMS, I will share our other goals for 1996 with you.
Doug Bechtel
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