Damaged Insulator causes safety hazard
Date posted: 2009-12-14
An insulator that appeared to have been hit by a bullet on the 34.5 kV transmission line caused an energized phase wire to rest on a crossarm.
This condition made the entire pole energized and could have caused great harm to anyone coming in contact. The extremly cold and dry weather the second week of December allowed the power to stay on, but when the weather changed the condition would have caused damage to the phase wire and crossarm, resulting in a power outage.
Power had to be shut off to replace the insulator so the decision was made to give members advance notice for the scheduled outage and get it fixed as soon as possible. It was a short turn-around to get notices mailed on Monday for a scheduled outage on Wednesday, December 9 at 7:30 am. This turned out to be one of the coldest days of the year and even the short outage (it took 45 minutes to restore power) caused members some problems going without electricity at that time of the day.
Having it to do over again and knowing the extent of the cold weather that morning, it would have been better to schedule the repair for later in the day when temperatures warmed. We will take this as a lesson learned and work to improve our service to our members.
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