Replacing electrical system components requires care

MOSES LAKE — It didn’t end well for that power pole – that tends to happen when they get hit by a vehicle. 

Sometimes it’s a relatively minor incident, like the pole on Gumwood Street in Moses Lake that lost a four-foot section to a garbage truck Dec. 27. Sometimes it’s more serious, like the one on Road 26 Southwest that took out a distribution pole and cut power to about 1,020 customers Dec. 31. Or the lines that went down southwest of Quincy on Dec. 26.  

In any case, a broken power pole has to be fixed, whether it’s at dusk on a winter Friday afternoon or just after midnight on New Year’s Eve. That's the job of line crews.  

The crew arrived on Gumwood Street with three trucks and a replacement pole. Tyler DeLong, line office supervisor for the Grant County Public Utility District, said crews were aided by the short distance between the damaged pole and the ones on either side. 

“Due to the short spans – distance to the surrounding poles – the pole was held up by the wire and did not fall to the ground, causing a fault,” DeLong wrote in response to an email from the Columbia Basin Herald. 

So – power pole hanging by its wires, night falling, street with a respectable amount of traffic. One truck stabilized the pole while crews started detaching the power lines. There were six.  

Crews worked from the bottom up, disconnecting wires from insulators as they went. From the ground, the wires at the top of the pole look like they’re strung in one long strand, which they are, but they’re kept in place with another set of wires. It’s looped around the insulator and wrapped around the electrical wire.  

“That is copper wire that we use to hold the overhead conductor to the insulator,” DeLong said. 

Crews don’t work on that one directly. It’s unwound with the help of a clamp on the end of a four-foot handle. On Gumwood Street that required maneuvering overhead.  

“Luckily, they were short spans so they untie all the wires, which would not drop too far due to the adjacent structures holding them up,” DeLong said.  

That’s not always the case – the Dec. 26 outage near Quincy left lines on the ground. DeLong said people should stay out of the way of crews while they’re working. A post on the PUD’s social media said people should stay at least a school-bus length away from downed lines.  

As the work continued the lights were on in neighborhood businesses and homes.  

“It was a tangent with no devices that we had to take offline allowing everyone to stay energized,” DeLong said. 

Once all the wires were disconnected the old pole was removed; crews didn’t have to cut the sidewalk or adjacent alley, but did have to dig out the base.  

On Gumwood Street the pole was replaced in about three hours.

    Grant County PUD line workers go about the tricky business of removing electrical wires from a broken power pole. In some instances, the lines are live when these replacements occur, resulting in the need for extra caution on the part of line workers.
  

    Grant County PUD line crews stabilize the broken end of a power pole.
  

    Replacing a power pole involves work in tricky places.
  

    A broken power pole is removed on Gumwood Street in Moses Lake.