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Power of patience: Line crews put in long hours to restore electricity

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First Snowstorm of 2009

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JANESVILLE — The wind picked up and snow continued to fall Wednesday afternoon as the bucket truck lifted Bob Dahl to fix a busted jumper wire at the corner of Newville Road and County M.

It was a routine trip in the bucket of the Rock Energy Cooperative truck after being called in to work at 11:30 p.m. Tuesday. Nearly 12 hours later, he likely was only halfway into his workday of helping to restore power to 1,200 customers still powerless at noon Wednesday.

Around 3 a.m., Dahl had stuck a ruler into the snow and measured 13 inches.

The linemen work “’til we’re done,” said Dahl’s crew partner, Denny Dolgner.

“Once we start getting into, like, 24 hours straight, then you start slurring your words, and your brain doesn’t work as good,” said Dolgner, who’s been fixing lines for 33 years.

The pair chased outages around snow-covered county roads, getting stuck several times. Downed trees and branches caused the majority of power outages Wednesday, but it was the vibrations that caused the wire to break at this stop, Dolgner said.

Ask Dolgner what they’ve seen the most of Wednesday, and without a second of hesitation he looks directly in the eye to emphatically say, “Pine trees!”

“If I had a dollar for every pine tree we trimmed today, I could retire,” Dolgner said.

One line they fixed went down again, sending them to fix the same line twice.

“More trees came down, more branches,” Dahl said.

Every outage is a little different, he said. In some areas, the wire is down. Other times, the whole pole breaks and needs replacing, he said.

When people call in to ask when their power will be up, Dolgner said, “We’d like to tell them, ‘Step outside and look at the conditions.’”

The one thing they were thankful for was the daylight. Working at night slows the process and creates more headaches.

The two were happy to hear two more crews from Lancaster, in the southwestern corner of the state, were headed to assist in Rock County. Many of Rock Energy’s outages were in the Plymouth/Spring Valley/Newark townships area.

The goal was to restore all power by early evening, said Denny Schultz, Rock Energy’s director of utility operations.

But that assumed no more lines would go down despite wind picking up and mercury dropping.

“If the wind comes up tonight … we’re probably going to be right back where we started from,” he said.

It’s not uncommon for crews to work 24 to 30 hours straight if it looks like there’s light at the end of the tunnel, said Lynn Maier, operations manager.

But if it gets to the point where crews aren’t gaining anything after such a long stretch, they’re sent home for rest.

At Rock Energy’s Janesville office on Kenney Road Maier switched constantly Wednesday between answering his desk phone and cell phone. He worked between the outage management database on one computer screen and a map on another computer screen and scribbled crew locations on a yellow notepad.

The energy co-op uses an answering service at the start of a storm, but as the service gets overwhelmed, they bring in on-call employees to take over, said Denny Schultz, director of utility operations.

Maier directs traffic by mapping where crews should be sent. The biggest concern is knowing where crews are before a line is energized, they said, and phone calls or radio pages are made before that happens.

The database system sometimes shows which customers are on oxygen, for example, which prioritizes the outage, Maier said.

“Otherwise, it’s pretty much how the crews work—where the storm originated from, and then we just kind of pan out from there,” he said.

“We’re still working at it,” Maier wanted people to know. “Even though it might not be a truck in the area, we’re working our way there.”

Schultz asked for patience among customers.

“The people that we’ve got working, you’ve got to give them a ton of credit because it’s just one right after another until it’s done,” he said.