It doesn’t matter if it’s the middle of the night during a snowstorm or the height of a summer heat wave — if there’s a power outage, Clark Public Utilities servicemen run toward the danger and don’t leave until the lights are back on.
In 2018, the average outage lasted more than four hours in Washington, according to the American Public Power Association. Clark Public Utilities kept outages down to just 35 minutes.
Such short outages are the result of hard work and a collaborative, highly disciplined and customer-focused approach to delivering energy. But, without servicemen who are the first to respond to a fault in the system, those outages would be much longer.
“Repairing outages are our top priorities,” Clark Public Utilities Serviceman Kenton Cudd said. “Our schedules are plenty busy with appointments for things like routine maintenance, customer service requests; but if there’s an outage, those things are put on hold and we head to where the trouble is.”
Similar to how police and firefighters are the first responders to an emergency, utility servicemen are the first to respond to problems with the electric system. Whether it’s a blink in the afternoon or a full-blown outage in the middle of the night, they’re the utility’s boots on the ground for inspections and most repairs.
Servicemen are usually a one-person crew with a work truck at the ready and situated in strategic locations around the county. When an incident happens, they jump in the cab and go straight to the scene. That approach makes incident response times much shorter than if they had to first to go the utility’s Operations Center to grab a truck before reporting to the outage.
Servicemen are journeyman line workers who are prepared for about everything that comes their way. Nine times out of 10, servicemen’s know-how, tools and bucket truck are all they need, but sometimes the job is too large or complex for one person.
When that happens, a serviceman assesses the damage, needed repairs and necessary tools and reports it to utility dispatch. The dispatchers, who also work around the clock every day of the year, then sends out a multiperson line crew with the necessary equipment and materials to make the repairs.
Clark Public Utilities owns 6,600 miles of electric wire and 62,000 power poles across a 628-square-mile county, all of which is maintained and repaired on a routine basis, but not every single wire is under its care.
When a customer reports an issue, a serviceman will come out to investigate. Generally, the utility’s responsibility ends at the electric meter on the side of the customer’s home or other building. When it’s clear the utility’s equipment isn’t at fault, servicemen often do a quick assessment of the customer’s equipment to help identify the issue and recommend calling a professional electrician.
Winter is often the busiest time of year for servicemen. Extreme heat and cold put great strain on energy infrastructure. When those days come, servicemen work closely with dispatchers to connect or disconnect different substations around the county to balance the load to safer, more manageable levels.
Also, winter’s powerful storms often damage trees, which in turn damage power lines and keep servicemen and line crews on their toes.
Customers can help crews quickly locate outages by reporting them to 360-992-8000 or online using the outage reporting tool on a computer or smartphone. The more reports received, the quicker the fault can be located.
Energy Adviser is written by Clark Public Utilities. Send questions to ecod@clarkpud.com or to Energy Adviser, c/o Clark Public Utilities, P.O. Box 8900, Vancouver, WA 98668.
