WASHINGTON — In 2011, Maryland’s Public Service Commission took Pepco to task for failing to make upgrades to an aging infrastructure. Since then, Pepco has spent millions on boosting its tree-trimming operations, upgrading utility poles and their cross-arms and even reinforcing power lines with something called “tree wire.”
Mike Maxwell, vice president of asset management for Pepco, says tree wire makes the wire more resistant to giving way under tree limbs. “It’s an insulated wire that has a sort of neoprene or insulated jacketing over the wire itself,” Maxwell explains.
At briefing Friday on Pepco’s snow operations, Maxwell said that Pepco has spent millions on improving the hardware in the system and that the utility company has made extensive preparations to face Winter Storm Jonas, which is projected to break records.
Even with the resiliency of the miles of reinforced powerlines, Maxwell says he doesn’t want to foster unrealistic expectations.
“That doesn’t mean there won’t be outages,” he says.
During outages, Maxwell says that generating estimates for restoration is already tricky and is made even more difficult when the weather is severe. Maxwell says Pepco crews face the same challenges as first responders who say their ability to get to incidents is hampered during blizzard conditions.
Then, once utility crews get to an outage site, they have to follow a battery of safety procedures. “Calling our control centers, to make sure that no one else is working on the same circuit, or making sure that no one else is going to try to close a breaker back at the station,” Maxwell says.
And then there’s the matter of what happens once a crew member gets the truck positioned to address downed wires. Maxwell says he has been up in a “bucket” during foul weather, an experience he described as unnerving.
“The bucket itself—the boom—will move,” he says. “You’re holding the wire in your hand. You’re using the boom itself to lift the wire.”
There are literally, a lot of moving parts, all of them being dealt with on a system that carries deadly levels of voltage.
All the while, Maxwell says, utility crews know that customers are eager for the power to come back on.
