Taking to the skies for static wire replacement project

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s … flying linemen?

 

If you were in the right place at the right time near a 12-mile stretch of transmission lines between Tell City North and Bandon Substation in early April, you might have caught a glimpse of linemen tethered underneath a helicopter, soaring through the air as part of Hoosier Energy’s Bandon Static Wire Replacement Project.

 

It was the first time using that approach for Hoosier, but one that delivered in efficiency as wire was replaced across 95 structures in less than three weeks rather than six months.

 

“With the helicopter, everything goes a lot faster,” said construction manager PJ Poynter. “We’re in and out quicker while there’s less worry about safety incidents than if we had to do matting and drive trucks in and out of the right of way.”

 

The contractor on the project, Intren, hired the helicopter crew with the linemen coming from California to perform the aerial line work.

 

Before anyone took to the skies, local cooperative Southern Indiana Power had its part to play. With a section of the line out for the duration of the project, they identified the regulators necessary to support the substation and put them in place a month ahead of the start of the project in order to supply members with power.

 

With the prep work done, the flying linemen began a two-part process.

 

First, the helicopter flies the linemen out to each structure, remove the old hardware and pull the static wire out. Much of the old wire had multiple splices, in some cases more than 20, from trees and limbs falling on the line in the past. These incidents weren’t the primary reason for the replacement, but they were a contributing factor.

 

“You’ve got to look at the overall condition of the entire line, not just the static wire,” Hoosier Energy Senior Project Manager Steven Jones said. “But given that the English crew had done a lot of maintenance on this line over the years, and majority of the poles had been replaced, it didn’t warrant a full scale rebuild of this line. But the samples of the static wire we took did test bad, so it needed some attention.”

 

In the process of removing the old wire, a few structures were found unsafe for landing and required replacement. These were structures that had been examined in the past but had unseen damage higher up.

 

“That required the English and Petersburg crews to mobilize to quickly change those structures out without holding things up,” Jones said. “It was definitely a lesson learned.”

 

With sound structures in place and the old static wire removed, the linemen made a second pass through all 95 structures to install the new static wire, restore hardware and tie the lines together.

 

And just like that, the flying linemen disappeared on the wings of the wind. When they’ll be back remains to be seen.

 

“We have other projects where it doesn’t make sense to bring in the helicopter, but if the opportunity arises and it fits a need as this one did, we’ve got another tool in our belt,” Jones said.