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Among Keys Energy Service linemen are Manny Estevez, left, Paul Sanchez, Michael Euliss and Alberto Pumar.

 

 

Working with live wires necessary, but spells danger

 

BY JOHN L. GUERRA

Konk Life Staff Writer

If there is a “most dangerous job” in the Keys, it’s probably working with those live transmission wires that follow the Overseas Highway from the mainland to Key West.

They carry 69,000 volts, or 69KV in the nomenclature of that hair-raising business. Consider, too, that for most of its length, the transmission line hangs over water. It’s dangerous territory.

Any homeowner can tell you that house current, which is roughly 120 volts, is unpleasant when one gets in its way. 69KV is a whole different animal. At that level, it is unnecessary to come into direct contact with charged equipment to be shocked. If a human body gets hit with an arc from those wires, the heart stops, the blood boils and, well, one cooks. The energy is so intense that it can melt a hardhat.

That’s why most 69KV work is done with the power off, or at least sidetracked from the electrical lines that are to be moved or otherwise handled.

Linemen Manny Estevez, Paul Sanchez, Michael Euliss and Alberto Pumar, as part of Keys Energy Service’s full system upgrade, worked with live 69KV lines — all four of them standing on the same concrete pole over salt water, which conducts like mad.

“That’s their office,” said Julio J. Torrado, the communications and marketing coordinator for KEYS. “It takes a special kind of person to do this kind of work.”

Because turning off those lines would have cost the utility $230,000, the decision was made to use a new technique to keep them live during the work. The power company thought long and hard before making this decision, said David Price, the man in charge of transmission and distribution for KEYS.

Estevez, Sanchez, Euliss and Pumar are brave, but they aren’t crazy. They are trained linemen, like the other KEYS workers one sees in the bucket trucks next to poles in Key West, moving transformers or replacing fuses. They use such safety equipment as insulated booms on their bucket trucks, rubber blankets to lay over live wires, insulated boots and long, thick rubber gloves that run to their shoulders, to name a few.

But none of those are strong enough to protect against 69KV, so when the four team members had to move insulators mounted on a concrete pole alongside the Seven Mile Bridge, they used another approach using long, fiberglass poles called hotsticks. Hotsticks allow a lineman to grab a single, energized line and hold it away from a pole. The hotstick is long enough to protect the worker from an arc.

“With the line being energized everyone’s alert level and safety awareness was greatly increased,” Price said.

“The guys were going through a hotstick training program to be able to work on energized lines,” Torrado said. “We determined that this was the perfect project for them to do as the final part of that training. They were able to get their certification and at the same time help accomplish the task.”

The work was part of a system-wide fix to the KEYS system, which was required by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation. After hiring a helicopter to fly the length of the transmission lines, KEYS, using 3D imaging, found wires that had sagged and other items that needed upgrading. NERC required all electricity providers nationwide to do the same study and repair, said Dale Finigan, director of engineering for the KEYS.

“Like many other utilities, we found discrepancies,” Finigan said. “That was the whole purpose of this rating alert. We identified 26 clearance issues, prioritized the concerns, and began the process of correcting them.”

So Estevez, Sanchez, Euliss and Pumar read wiring diagrams, did dry-runs and reviewed each step they’d take once they were on each of the two concrete poles they would climb.

“The guys practiced the entire procedure, short of moving the insulators, prior to the event,” Price said.

When it came time to do the work, the men boarded a boat with all their equipment and motored out to the poles, which are sunk in the muck next to the Seven Mile Bridge.

The biggest challenge was lifting and holding each 69KV line away from the pole so the insulator it had been mounted on could be moved higher up the pole. Once the insulator was in its new position, the electric line would then be reattached, thus raising the line to the NERC-required height. They repeated the procedure on two poles, which took about four hours.

“It’s not quick work,” Torrado said.

KEYS budgeted $230,000 to accomplish the changes throughout the system in 2014; the cost of the engineering, the helicopter 3D analysis and other aspects of the field change, as Torrado called it, was $122,700.

According to Finigan, the power company deals with electric lines over water much of the time. “We have nearly 800 transmission poles; over half are over the water,” he said.

The performance of the electrical grid has improved in recent years because of constant maintenance, Torrado said. Power outages in the KEYS area have steadily decreased, the utility’s records show. In 2009, Key West and the Lower Keys saw 70 outages; in 2010, 45 outages, and in 2013, 33 outages.

 

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