Adventures with Power (revisited)

The planned outage at the 4KV, 7th and Maple substation didn't quite go as scheduled. The scheduled time for the outage was 11:00 PM Friday night. As you all are aware, at 4:00PM Friday GHPUD had a lightning arrester fail at the Elma substation which caused a power outage for pretty much all of East County. At the time of the event I contacted the PUD and they were still investigating the source of their problem. I was advised that it could be a minimum of two to four hours in duration. At that time we (the City) discussed going forward with our maintenance early and "take advantage" of the non-scheduled outage. Our thoughts were that why wait for the PUD to make their repairs which could take multiple hours, re-energize and then have another outage at 11:00 as planned.

We decided to go forward with our work. At the time we had our sub off-line, grounds installed, and were proceeding to start on the removal of the regulators, the PUD contacted me to confirm we were "in the clear" and that they were ready to "come hot" to McCleary. We advised them that we were in the clear and they heated up the City's l2KV substation.

Due to the efforts of the PUD Substation Crews and East County Crews their outage was kept to only 1 hour. This also presented another decision to the City. One; put our 4KV sub back together, re-energize and stick to the planned outage at ll:00. Or two; continue with the work we had started. We chose to proceed with the work already in progress. This decision in my opinion actually worked in everybody's favor other than the timing. We removed and re-installed the new regulators and had the substation and our customers energized by 9:00 that evening.

From Paul Nott's May 2, 2011 staff report

Kudos to McCleary Light & Power!

What is a lightning arrester?