This is Ozarks at Large. I'm Kyle Kellams.
March can come in like a lion and leave like one, too. Winter and early spring storms can deliver lightning, high winds and more. That can mean power outages.
Steve Smith works for SWEPCO and says whether it is a thunderstorm, an ice storm like the one in 2009 or any other outage, he's ready to help restore power.
Steve Smith: It's a 24/7 job. It doesn't matter if it's your birthday, your wife's birthday, it doesn't matter if it's a holiday. It could be a company holiday. If there's an outage, we're there. No complaints.
Smith's job title: Troubleman.
Steve Smith and Rusty Story, distribution systems supervisor for SWEPCO's Fayetteville district, recently came to the Bruce and Ann Applegate News Studio One to talk about outages and repairs.
Steve says he and other troublemen are the first on site when there's a reported outage.
Smith: Basically, when the power goes out, the troublemen are the first ones to respond. We don't just roll up with the whole crew and all the trucks. So if your lights go out, the troubleman goes out, finds out what the problem is, and tries to fix it the best he can. And then if he can't fix it, then you call for the whole crew.
Kyle Kellams: So it could be something as benign — or as minor — as a squirrel getting fried and knocking out a transmitter.
Smith: Yep. Yeah, most of the time that's what you hope it is?
Smith: Just a squirrel or something. Easy, you can fix. But it can be any time of the night, the weekends, whatever. You're the solo guy out there doing your own thing.
Kellams: So when you go out, you go out by yourself?
Smith: Yes, 95% of the time on trouble tickets, you're by yourself.
Kellams: I want to get back to these trouble tickets. Rusty, where are you in the chain?
Rusty Story: I am Stephen's support. That's what I do. I'm not as involved in the outage stuff as Stephen is. My day to day is really just to support Stephen and the construction crews. I'm over the troublemen and the construction crews for the Fayetteville area.
Kellams: So let's say it's late January, early February and we've got this forecast — we're expecting inches of snow, maybe some sleet, hopefully not ice, but there's going to be a weather impact. Is that a different sort of scenario? Are you getting ready?
Smith: Yeah, for sure. A week or a couple of weeks leading up to it, we have company forecasters who are looking throughout our entire territory. Let's say it looks like the most damage is going to be in the Fayetteville district. That's when we start making game plans of, OK, if it impacts us this much, this is the amount of resources we're going to need. If it gets down to it and it's way bigger, we'll start dispatching linemen from our other districts. In SWEPCO, we go all the way down to Shreveport. Then if it gets real bad, we can dispatch linemen from our other territories. We might go to PSO in Tulsa. They might come here. We've gone to West Virginia. And we also bring in a lot of contract — we have a lot of mutual aid agreements with other companies and contractors as well. So we can bring in as many linemen as we need, assuming the storm's not so widespread that everybody's fighting for resources, which here lately with a lot of the storms you've seen — there's been a lot of news about other companies struggling to get the lights on in what customers consider a timely manner. But they just see it from their front porch. They don't really see it from the front lines in those kinds of situations. Everybody's fighting for resources to get in and try to get it on as quickly and safely as possible at the same time.
Kellams: Yeah. When there's a storm from Albuquerque to Trenton, N.J.
Story and Smith: That's right.
Kellams: Spring, of course, can bring thunderstorms. Tornadoes are not as easy — you can't predict them out as much. It's a crapshoot, right? It may come in and rain but no loss of power. So is that different?
Story: I would say that is different. Our meteorologists a lot of times will predict wind. They're going to say the Fayetteville area, for example, could expect 60 to 70 mph wind with this line of storms coming through. Sometimes that plays out that way. Sometimes it doesn't. The spring is harder because of just what you said — it's so unpredictable. You're not going to have just a ton of resources standing by in that situation, because in the spring that happens every other day. So sometimes it's going to be more of a reaction in the spring than it might be if you're predicting 6 inches of wet snow or ice, if that makes sense.
Rusty Story, distribution system supervisor for SWEPCO's Fayetteville district, says spring storms can also have potential for delayed effects. He says a calm day after a major storm has rolled through can also bring outages.
Story: Storm comes through, we have heavy lightning — that can weaken some fuses and things that we have on our system. So then let's say the next day the heat gets up. That increases load on that fuse. And we could have a fuse fail from a prior day's storm because of the lightning. So we really try to manage that the best we can. In the Fayetteville district, we spend a lot of time on what we call reliability. Every month in the Fayetteville district we go over what we call repeat outages. If a customer has been off three times in the last 12 months, we actually go and troubleshoot — the power could be on — but we go and troubleshoot that, and we're going to try and make a system improvement to keep that customer from seeing that many outages.
Kellams: Steven, do you have to climb poles?
Smith: Oh, yeah. You still climb. I mean, you climb a bunch as an apprentice. Then you hope the further along in your career you get to work out of a bucket. But unfortunately we still have poles in backyards everywhere. If you have to climb, I'll call another guy out with me and say, hey, I got to climb a pole. But yeah, I still climb. Got the belt, your hooks. And you carry everything with you. You've got about 45, 50 pounds strapped to you when you're climbing up that pole. That's about a third of my body weight.
Kellams: This may sound like a silly question, but on that belt, you've got to know where everything is — everything's got its place — because you don't want to have to spend a lot of time looking and searching. Can you just go by feel?
Smith: Yeah. My tool belt, it's set up the same way as when I started climbing. Everything's kind of behind you. You reach and you just kind of — it's second nature to where everything's at on your belt pretty much. But if we've got to bring up tools and material, we also bring a hand line with us. So the guy on the ground can lift all of our tools and hardware and stuff up to us.
Kellams: So when you solo bucket, you're doing the bucket and everything yourself?
Smith: Yeah, yeah. You have all your controls up in your bucket. And some buckets have jibs on them, which is an arm with a winch line so you can hang a transformer by yourself, if you're in that situation.
Kellams: Generally, can you tell within a few minutes what the problem is?
Smith: Most of the time, if you walk up and there's a dead squirrel on the ground. Yeah, that's about 90 percent of it during the spring until the trees start getting green and start getting real heavy. But most of the time you can figure out what's going on. A lot of the town, especially downtown, is underground. And that's when it starts taking a lot more time, because you've got to open up cabinets and you've got a lot of walking. When you have an underground outage you have to be a lot more thorough with your investigation, whereas unless you just have a single transformer, it's pretty obvious what the problem is.
Predicting power outages may be an imprecise exercise, but sometimes forecasts can make widespread outages seem more likely. That is when something called a lay-down yard can come into play.
Story: I'll use 2009 as an example. One of the lay-down yards we used was — the University of Arkansas let us use a big parking lot down there at Baum. And we had multiple — I'm not sure where the other one was at here in town — but a lay-down yard is basically where we're going to have a lot of material: poles, transformers, wire and your small stuff, staged basically for outside crews to come in and be able to get material to go restore power. The way it works is we've got substations planted around Northwest Arkansas, and they have circuits coming out of those substations, some of them tied in sequence to others. But we're going to have our outside resources assigned each one to a station. They're going to be out there with forestry crews, what we call assessors — guys out there patrolling the line — and then your line crews restoring. They're going to work in coordination together to restore power. Let's use an ice storm as an example — to restore power quickly. These lay-down yards are going to have equipment. Some of them we could use for temporary housing. You see a lot of that on hurricanes. When we go down south, they have a lot of temporary housing. Basically they are semi-trailers brought in with bunks and showers and that sort of thing. A lot of times they're set up at either fairgrounds or airport runways, things of that nature. You've got a lot of land and you've got thousands of trucks that you've got to park there, and thousands of resources — personnel — that you've got to house, shower, do their laundry, feed. There are companies out there that have gotten really good at making that really efficient. They can have those things set up in a day.
Smith: Storm services?
Story: Yeah. Storm services. They do a good job of that. Look, the guys typically when we go into storm mode, they're working 16-plus hours a day. It's important for them to have a decent place to sleep, a decent place to clean up. These companies that do that, they've gotten really good at it. A lot of them are really nice. It's not like staying in a hotel, but it's better than sleeping in the cab of a truck, for sure.
Rusty Story is a distribution system supervisor for SWEPCO's Fayetteville district. Steve Smith is a troubleman for SWEPCO. One last bit of advice from them: if your power goes out, don't assume your utility provider knows. Report the outage.
Our conversation took place at the Carver Center for Public Radio.
