PRECorp discusses powerline project impacts

On Thursday afternoon, Powder River Energy welcomed local residents to an open house opportunity to ask questions about upcoming power line construction throughout town.

The project will involve rebuilding the electrical infrastructure throughout town, beginning this year with the area north of the alley south of Cleveland St., as well as the Sundance Country Club, Crook County Fairgrounds and school buildings.

In 2020, the project will move to the south of Cleveland Street. Once complete, the aging infrastructure throughout Sundance will have been replaced with modern poles and wire.

While work is ongoing, residents will experience outages as the structures in their area are replaced. This will likely involve two separate outages, the first when changing out the structure and the second during the cutover.

“We try not to shoot for anything over six hours, most outages we try to shoot for around four hours,” says Nick Fraser of contractors Schulte TA.

“A lot of it becomes pre-planning and maybe pre-outages before a major cutover to try to reduce the actual outage time.”

Residents will, however, be given plenty of warning that an outage has been scheduled.

“There will be a minimum of 48 hours’ notice on any outages that we have,” says Rick Gill, PRECorp.

“It will probably be over the phone or face-to-face when we’re getting into that area – it won’t be a surprise to anyone.”

An additional indication that outages are coming soon will be the presence of the contractors nearby.

“Say we start on one alley, we will build that whole alley, so we could know up to a week in advance,” Fraser says. “It might fluctuate a little bit from day to day, but we’ll know in advance.”

Fraser hopes the outages will cause the minimum possible disruption, he says.

“A lot of times we will work around the consumer,” he says. For example, if there is a time of day that’s inconvenient for a business, such as a restaurant needing power over the lunch period, Schulte will aim to schedule outages at a time that works better.

Aside from the outages, Fraser does not expect the project to impact residents in any way. Schulte prides itself on leaving the ground in exactly the state it was before the construction, Fraser says, with no unnecessary damage.

The upgrade project is similar to the update in Moorcroft a few years ago and Hulett last year, says Gill. Vista West is likely to see a similar project in the near future, but no other upgrade projects are scheduled at this time.

The outages will begin in July and are expected to end around October, though a precise date is difficult to predict before work begins.

If you have specific questions about construction in your area, contact Rick Gill at 290-0050 or Rod Malo at 290-2052, or the PRECorp Dispatch at 1-888-391-6220.

“We will be more than happy to meet people at their location and show them what we are going to be doing,” says Gill.