Home Jobs Employment Media Contacts Tours Video Gallery Photo Gallery Event Registration Calendar Generation Portfolio Buy power for resale
Crews fixing power lines near Bowdle
Thirty to 35 employees are working on the project. But with towers ranging from 90 to 160 feet tall, there's still a lot of work ahead.
Basin Electric Power Cooperative - May 26, 2010
Originally broadcast by KELOLAND TV
Reported by Erich Schaffhauser
Watch the video at this link: Crews fixing power lines near Bowdle
Plenty of reminders still remain from this weekend's severe weather in northeast South Dakota. In addition to tearing through farms, the tornados also took down power lines that have lasted years.
Everyone has their power back on, and it's been that way since Monday. But it'll be weeks before crews have all the lines repaired.
Ten steel transmission towers lie in ruins near Bowdle. The tornado that ripped through Saturday night also took down half of an eleventh one.
"Well, I've been with Basin Electric a little over 29 years. We've had some storm jobs in the past but never has it taken down this many structures of ours," assistant line superintendent Jan Fasching said.
Fasching says it could be a month to a month and a half before all the towers are standing again. Thirty to 35 employees are working on the project. But with towers ranging from 90 to 160 feet tall, there's still a lot of work ahead of them.
"It's going to take a while to get them all back up," Fasching said.
This round of damage isn't the worst FEM Electric out of Ipswich has seen this year. But crews there still have work ahead of them.
"Yeah, we have everybody back on,” general manager Scott Moore said. “We still have about two and a half miles of a three-phase to get back. It's laying flat on the ground."
FEM Electric lost 110 poles during the storm; some of those had just been replaced after the ice storm earlier this year.
The total damage comes to about $225,000 for FEM Electric. Basin Electric still doesn't know how much it will cost to fix its damage.
"We were down here in late January, beginning of February when you had that ice storm over here. We didn't really want to come back this soon," Fasching said.
Basin Electric has never had problems on that 30-year-old line until this year.
It’s a main transmission line from a power plant in Beulah, North Dakota, to a substation in Huron. The co-op is rerouting power through other transmission lines for now.
Headquarters
1717 East Interstate Avenue
Bismarck, ND 58503-0564 USA
Phone: 701.223.0441
