The road I live on has a grove of huge White Pine trees that break and fall every time the wind blows. I have named them the “widow makers” because I always have an eerie feeling that one is going to fall on me someday.
Like the trees on my road, when I drive around southwest Michigan, I can’t help but notice one thing: fallen trees. In fact, I can’t recall a time when I’ve seen so many large, uprooted trees lying on their side. The storms have been relentless this spring, with several tornados and other storms bringing wind gusts of about 60 mph. That kind of wind can, and has, wreaked havoc on trees and the things in their fall path.
It got me thinking about a couple of questions I’ve heard from you in recent months as a result of this weather, and I’d like to address them:
For starters, we do bury lines, and we have been doing so for years. It’s easier and more cost-effective to bury lines when they are first built. However, retrofitting our 4,000 miles of infrastructure would cost MEC billions. In fact, it can be as much as $750,000 to bury just one mile of existing line. At MEC, we strategically bury lines to balance cost and reliability.
More importantly though, buried lines aren’t 100% outage-proof. While it’s true that outages are less susceptible to Mother Nature, when they do occur, repairs are more complicated and expensive. In fact, sometimes crews have to dig up a large portion of line to find the cause and make the repair. That means that a single outage that could have been restored in a couple hours now becomes a matter of many hours.
As for reinforcing the poles, we are using larger poles when replacing fallen or bad poles, building new infrastructure, or upgrading lines as part of our regular maintenance. Before you ask, “Why aren’t you replacing all the poles right now?” We have about 100,000 poles, and just like with burying lines, we have to evaluate the overall cost. Unfortunately, our service territory isn’t small, so this will take time.
At the end of the day, though, the issue we’ve faced this year with storms isn’t the poles themselves; it’s that we’ve had a number of very big, old trees outside of our right-of-way fall onto our infrastructure. Legally, we can’t clear all those trees (nor would you want us to), but a tree big enough to reach our infrastructure from over 15 feet away is certainly big enough to cause damage, no matter how big the pole is. Imagine if it were your house!
Therefore, the most effective things we can do are to keep burying lines when it makes sense, replace poles with larger stronger poles, keep our rights-of-way clear and to leverage our smart grid to identify and isolate outages so we can get your lights back on as quickly as possible. In fact, I am happy to report that we’ve restored all storm outages this year in under 48 hours.
The abundant trees in our area are part of what makes rural Michigan so beautiful, and my work commute so scenic, even the eerie stretch on my road. But with that beauty comes the risk that Mother Nature will do what Mother Nature does. While we can’t ever make our system 100% outage-proof, rest assured that we are prepared, and we will minimize the impact that high winds have on our system and your life, without breaking your bank.