Want to be a hero to upper management? Then bury your problems. Submerge them. Keep them from seeing the light of day. Drive down costs of your underground construction projects by putting in inferior systems made up of marginal products and installed by low-cost contractors (many just arrived from the ailing telecom sector). Power cable, telecom cable, it's all the same, isn't it? When problems arise, you are likely to be in another department anyway, with the next unlucky schmuck stuck unraveling the mess you created.

Here is what has me all worked up. I was talking with a purchasing agent at a major utility. This company's enlightened management decided the utility didn't need staff engineers to evaluate products. The company could just purchase the cheapest products on the market, as long as they could pass minimal standards.

I don't have a problem with standards products; in fact, I have assisted in the writing of several national standards. I've tested to national and international standards; I know what is in those standards. But realize that standards are consensus beasts and as such, set minimum thresholds of acceptability. Just because a product passed a standard doesn't guarantee it will perform reliably.

Also, and this might surprise you, vendors have been known to repeat tests until, low and behold, their materials somehow pass standards. A tweak here, a nudge there and out comes positive acceptance test data. Scrapping product is not a popular move in manufacturing circles.

Having tested materials to specify standards in a utility lab for 20 years, I often found myself in “discussions” with vendors on test procedures and data. Too often, our test data would contradict data obtained in factory tests. Vendors with faulty data were thrown off the approved list until they could redesign their product to meet standards. I recall one shipment of padmount transformers that was rejected and resubmitted five times before the vendor finally got serious and fixed the problem. I've seen cable rejected by one utility, only to show up on another utility's loading dock.

I digress. Let me get back to the here and now. With utilities under incredible financial strain, either from chintzy regulators or from subsidiaries gone awry, purchasing agents find themselves under intense pressure to spend less, regardless. Engineers are losing the ability to specify superior or innovative products. Let's say a new product is on the market that will provide significantly longer life, is cheaper to install and is backed by independent test data. How can a utility engineer justify expenditures based on total owning costs, when the financial guys care only about tomorrow, about first costs?

So far, I've just talked about product. What about installation? Utilities have cut staff so drastically that new or reassigned engineers don't even know what to look for when supervising installations. I'm talking basics here: foundations, cable pulling, backfill installation, duct integrity. If you think underground networks are simple, you haven't spent enough time in the field. There are a million ways to mess up a construction job, whether performed by your in-house staff or contracted out.

With the recent downsizings, utilities have few highly competent technical engineers remaining. This leaves less-experinced staff writing requests for proposals (RFPs) with gaps a contractor could drive a bulldozer through. We need to turn this trend around. There is no better antidote to underground problems than to invest in people who know the business.

Too many of our upper managers are politicians who are unwilling to take a stand. Their rationale: “If the dictate comes down from on high to cut, then we cut. We'll deal with the consequences later.” But if the system falls down during your watch, look out. Those guys who told you to cut are the same ones who will show you the door.

I am pleasantly surprised to find that the guys running the new independent transmission companies are highly competent. They have engineers in high places. They know their business. They understand that their assets have to be up and running to keep regulators happy and revenues flowing. They believe in quality. They hire the best talent. The new guys on the block know something we forgot. It's not to late to relearn what we once knew.

Fortunately, we haven't gone down the inferiority road so far that we can't come back. We still have quality vendors, quality engineering firms and quality contractors. We have the ability to put in an underground system that will pass the test of time. But do we have the political will? Let's build relationships with those suppliers and contractors who exhibit integrity. Let them make enough profit so they have the resources to can stand behind their products. Otherwise, we can forget service after the sell. Some really great vendors are getting to the breaking point, unable to provide the service that makes them feel good driving home in the evening. If we run the best companies out of business by focusing on price, we have only ourselves to blame.

Let's make sure we put quality underground and stop burying our problems; otherwise, our problems will surely bury us.