Index of Fun Facts: BPA Planned Power Outage May 9, 2014
Thank you to the OPALCO operations and engineering staff who brought us through this mandatory Bonneville Power Administration county-wide outage! For most of us, this was a smooth and seamless operation. Thanks, also, to the handful of co-op members who were out of power a little longer. This rare transmission outage event gave us the opportunity to really test our system and we found a few weak links. Thank you for your patience and understanding while we addressed those issues; we all benefit from a stronger, more reliable system as a result!
Preparations:
- 6 weeks to plan the county-wide outage event
- 9 regional meetings to work out the logistics
- 42 hours of labor (General Foreman-3, Line Foreman-3, Engineer) on May 8th to prepare for the May 9th outage
The Outage Event:
- 16 OPALCO personnel working (Lineman-13, General Foreman-2, Dispatcher)
- 4 Flaggers contracted for safety
- 15 BPA personnel (Lopez-2, Fidalgo Substation-10, Custer Substation-2, Vancouver, WA-1 )
- 96 OPALCO crew hours in the field (13 crew x 6 hours) doing maintenance and repair work
Results on OPALCO’s System:
- 12 transmission poles cleaned and inspected
- 7 miles of transmission line examined, maintained and tested
- 6 transmission poles re-built with new insulators
- 5 high-voltage switches cleaned and tested
- 4 new distribution switches installed and tested
- 1 hazardous tree trimmed
- 14,000 (approximately) members out of power
- 5 devices (out of 1,200+ total) failed upon restoraton of power (Lopez-2, San Juan-3)
- 6,000 (approximate total) members restored by 6:15 am
- 9,000 (approximate total) members restored by 6:30 am
- 12,000 (approximate total) members restored by 7:00 am. Note: After 7:00 am,
only Friday Harbor substation remained down, in part due to high system start-up loads. - All but 70 members restored by 8:00 am. This restoration delay was in part due to
high system loads that needed to be managed to prevent a low voltage condition for the entire Island. - 18 hours of continuous work by 2 members of our Lopez Crew (Tim Savage and Kai Burleson), who worked from 11:00 pm May 8th until 5:00 PM May 9th – staying on duty
to restore power to 44 members on Lopez. All other crews were released at 10:00 am
May 9th.
