News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
Cookeville Electric Department budgeting to replace below-ground lines for two subdivisions this year: Laurel Park and Hillsdale.
Director Carl Haney said they prioritize these projects by looking at where the department sees the most failures. He said with below-ground lines, the failure is a result of direct bury lines.
“But they were put in probably 40 to 50 years ago and back then everything was direct buried not in conduits. Today all of our undergrounds are installed inside a conduit,” Haney said. “Over time, especially that many years, you start seeing failures.”
Haney said they also look at the replacement of overhead lines. He said that work will not only involve line replacement, but underground boring to move them to conduit-buried lines.
Haney said typically this work creates no disruption in service for the customers. He said the main inconvenience will be the presence of work crews, which will not be too prominent.
“What we’ll do is we keep the power on, we go out we bore the conduits in, get the transformers ready to go, we’ll pull a new wire,” Haney said. “And really the only outage they see is when we’re actually just transferring their service over to the new underground system. And that’s really very minor, each service only takes minutes probably 30 to 45 minutes to transfer over.”
Haney said they have seen a lot of success in decreasing failures after replacing. He said any cable failures go down to zero. For subdivisions like Sherwood, where overhead lines were put underground, they fixed outage issues they had when storms were present.
