Utility District Offer Electronics and Bandwidth
Five years ago, the Pend Oreille County Public Utility District (Newport, Washington, U.S.) had a great idea. It leveraged an underutilized fiber-optic...
Katrina Rebuild
No one could have imagined the magnitude of damage Katrina would wreak on the states of Louisiana and Mississippi. This storm was so powerful and so massive...
Tight Spaces? Consider Alternative-Material Poles
Like most utilities, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP; Los Angeles, California) has used wood poles since the municipal utility was...
Nuon Enhances Safety and Design
Nuon,a regulated electricity distribution company in the Netherlands, faces a continual challenge to reduce system operation and maintenance costs, while...
Fuel Cell Installed on College Campus
A high-temperature, carbonate fuel cell soon will soon be generating 250 kW of electricity, as well as providing residual heat for hot water and heating,...
Wire Theft Impacts Reliability and Safety
From Jan. 1, 2005, to Dec. 5, 2005, TXU Electric Delivery's Dallas (Texas) District experienced more than 117 security incidents involving illegal entry...
Stray Voltage: Know Your Terms
Confusion about the term stray voltage is a serious concern. Historically, the term was associated with an elevated voltage that is difficult to mitigate...
Engineers Roll Out New Device for Testing Cables in Controlled Environments
A NEW CABLE TESTING DEVICE will help electric distribution utility workers discover and fix weaknesses in cables under controlled environments, before...
Linemen Give it Their All
When Hurricane Katrina devastated the coastlines of Louisiana and Mississippi the night of Aug. 29, 2005, dedicated IBEW linemen from all over the country...
Hurricane Hotels
Checking into the Hancock Hilton does not consist of giving your baggage to a bellhop and presenting a credit card for the room and incidentals. When...
Asplundh's Storm Logistics Based on Utility Needs
Very few utilities are located in areas where their operations are never adversely impacted by some type of storm or natural disaster. Whether it be ice...
AGING POLE PLANTS
Most utility companies installed poles at higher rates during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s than they have replaced them during the 1980s, 1990s and the...
Linemen in the Gulf
It's been six months since Katrina and Rita wreaked havoc in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas. Power is now restored to all homes and businesses...
Rigorous Maintenance Program Reduces Wood Pole Failures
Wood poles are one of electric utilities' largest and most visible assets. The majority of these poles, which experts estimate to be between 150 and 200...
Rough Conditions Require Off-Road Equipment
West Virginia has some of the roughest terrain in the United States. This has not stopped people from building homes and businesses in rocky, wilderness...
The Right Tools in The Right Hands
I became an apprentice in 1979, and topped out in 1984. I worked in construction for about 10 years, and ended up working for the City of Colton in California,...
Tales from the Field
A UTILITY ARBORIST'S TALE JOE MARSHALL WAS PART OF ENTERGY'S RESPONSE TEAM dispatched to assist the company's vegetation management group in the aftermath...
Contractors to the Rescue
ON AUG. 29, 2005, HURRICANE KATRINA, WITH ITS 145-MPH WINDS AND POUNDING RAIN, slammed into New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, demolishing transmission...
Reinforcing the Front Line
STORMS HAPPEN AROUND THE GULF COAST FREQUENTLY enough to make planning for them a matter of good business practice. Like all of the utilities in the path...
No Preservatives Required
Results of laboratory testing and field evaluations show that tropical hardwoods offer an environmentally safe and robust alternative to preservative-treated...
BLUE HATS: A WORK IN PROGRESS
TODAY, IT IS HARD FOR APPRENTICES AND YOUNG JOURNEYMEN TO FIND THE TIME to watch and learn the trade like we did 30 years ago. With the shortages and...
CLEANING UP AFTER KATRINA
OF COURSE, NOT ALL AREAS DAMAGED BY HURRICANE KATRINA REQUIRED THE SERVICES OF TREE-TRIMMING CREWS. In areas where the storm surge reduced homes to concrete...
BGE TRANSFORMS VEGETATION PROGRAM
FACTOR IN MORE THAN 2 MILLION TREES OF MANY SPECIES GROWN in a favorable climate with good soil conditions with 1.1 million electric customers served through 9400 line-mile overhead and 13,800 miles of underground distribution system, and you have the basis for a potential collision among reliability, trees and customers. Additionally, bulk power is transported...
Electric Co-Operative Switches to Soy Oil-Based Transformer Fluid
Monroe County Electric Co-operative has converted to Cooper Power Systems' Envirotemp FR3 fluid in its pad-mount and overhead transformers. The first...
SAFETY New ANSI Fall Protection Standards Proposed
Falls have moved from the third leading cause of work-related death to become the number one killer of construction workers and the second leading cause...
