SLV REC crews deal with record outages

A member of the SLV REC line crew works on an electrical line in wintery conditions.


SAN LUIS VALLEY– What eventually became known as a “bomb cyclone” of a winter storm that wreaked havoc on Colorado’s front range and eastern plains last Wednesday and Thursday took its toll on the San Luis Valley in the days preceding.
San Luis Valley Rural Electric Cooperative (REC) took the brunt of the wintery blow here with heavy, wet snow loading on transmission lines knocking out two-thirds of their electrical system, according to Andrea Oaks-Jaramillo, marketing and economic development director for the REC. Nine of the coop’s 15 substations were down at some point between Monday night and Tuesday, and a total of 3,000 electric meters were affected.
Tri-State Electric Co-op, REC’s provider, and Xcel Energy were also affected by the powerful storm.
“We had a very good collaborative effort restoring power with Tri-State and Xcel,” Oaks-Jaramillo said.
Snow loading on lines caused sagging and stress on the lines which tripped the substations, she explained. REC’s substations that went down were Creede, Center, Highlands, La Garita, Hooper, Moffat, Ox Cart, Plaza and part of South Fork.
By Wednesday evening, all but a handful of REC customers were back on line.
Oaks-Jaramillo said the outages started about 10:15 p.m. last Monday and REC crews were almost immediately called into action. All substations were re-energized by Tuesday afternoon, but then the real work began; finding and repairing infrastructure such as downed lines and broken pole cross arms and insulators, causing sagging lines and electrical arcing.
REC linemen and even supervisors rotated on 16-hour shifts and had to be called back in by 7 p.m. Tuesday for safety reasons, Oaks-Jaramillo said, and about 1,100 customers were still without power.
Eight additional linemen from other electrical co-ops were called in on Wednesday to assist the 25-member REC crew. Three linemen from both the San Isabel (Walsenburg-Trinidad) and Sangre de Cristo (Buena Vista) coops assisted as well as two from Southeast Colorado Power (Lamar).
The last line crews worked until about 9:30 p.m. Wednesday when only a few isolated outages were left.
Oaks-Jaramillo, who has been with REC for five years, said she had never seen this wide of an outage affecting customers from Creede to Monte Vista and from South Fork to Moffat. She praised the REC’s dedicated staff and those linemen from other co-ops, and thanked customers for their patience.
The REC’s command center was manned by Loren Howard, CEO of REC and Ciello, Shawn McKibbon, operations superintendent, Justin Harrison, systems operator, and Terry Daley, engineering manager. Crew foreman for the co-op are Ronnie Spencer, Ryan Christensen and Randy Magnuson.
“We had every available human on the ground,” Oaks-Jaramillo said, noting that at as of Thursday afternoon power had been restored to all meters.


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