Night Switching - Putting the System back to Normal

What perfect timing for the 69,000 volt transmission line to go down and dump 2 substations. All 3 crews were working on multiple jobs out on the far ends of our system. Little to no cell service in the middle of nowhere. Some were changing out switches at the base of the Windmills and one crew was pulling in some new overhead wire. The crew pulling wire needed an extra hand so the other serviceman went to help. That left by myself to handle whatever outages came up throughout the day. It would take around an hour or more to get help if I needed it. That is if we could get a hold of them. Lol.

Our substations are fed from Bonneville Power Administration’s transmissions lines. When they go down for some reason, we go down. Yet we have a way to work around it.

When I got I call that both substations fed off of BPA’s 69kv line went down I knew it was time to get all the customers moved over to the other substation. One of our substations can pack the load of the whole system, having only one source of power is a terrible idea. With help around 1 hour away I headed to the bigger of the 2 substations and isolated it from the rest of the system. Then thanks to some recently installed overhead switches it was a matter of an hour and a half before I had all the customers effected by the outage power restored. Granted help showed up in time to close 2 of the switches which helped.

Bonneville seemed to be unaware of what happened that caused the 69KV line to go down. They were thinking it was some poopy covered insulators in their substation that flashed over and opened the breaker. The last thing I heard is they brought a crew in to pressure wash all the insulators. They have this bird diverter machine in the substation that works really good. The BPA substation guy told me it doesn’t work too good when the wind blows... interesting.

They ended up getting things all cleaned up and the 69KV line energized around 6 pm. We hung out and waited for them so that we could get our system put back to normal and all the load balanced out between the substations.

Going back to normal is a little more envolved. We have to mess with the voltage regulators, parallel circuits and break parallel, check amp readings... you know that sort of stuff. 😉

Then it finally arrived!! Our new Linetruck was finally built and delivered. The guys did a great job designing this beast of a truck.

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