Embracing the Challenges of Cold Weather
Embracing the Challenges of Cold Weather
Cody Schmidt is a Southern California Edison troubleman who has spent 21 years working in the coldest parts of the company’s service area. This year, he’s in the Bishop/Mammoth district, where a new snowstorm arrived Wednesday and another is forecast for Saturday.
Schmidt’s job is to be first on the scene when something threatens the safe flow of power to SCE’s customers. This time of year, those hazards include snow, ice, rain and mudflows.
“It’s still the same work, but things tend to be a lot heavier because they have ice and snow on them,” Schmidt said. “The hardest part is getting where you need to go. You need to be ready with warm clothes, winter boots, extra gloves and ice cleats. It’s also a good idea to carry extra food and water in your vehicle in case you get stuck for several hours.”
Last year, Schmidt was deployed to the Arrowhead district, where back-to-back snowstorms toppled power poles, detached conductor lines, froze equipment and interrupted electrical service for SCE’s 28,600 customers in that area. Although SCE mobilized an Incident Management Team well before the storms and had about 1,000 crew members systemwide standing by to respond to outages, the severity of the snow and its impact on equipment mobility was unlike anything many veterans had experienced.
“In Arrowhead last year, it was very challenging getting around,” Schmidt recalled. “We were hiking in, figuring out problems, then hiking back to the truck to get the equipment we needed, then hiking back in to fix it.”
Karen Golde is the senior manager of distribution operations at SCE’s Arrowhead district. She began this year’s preparations for the impact of winter weather back in November.
“We try to be proactive because we’ve learned in the past that once the snow starts to fall, we have too many customer calls, and our crews get so spread out, it becomes very difficult to respond the way we need to,” Golde said. “We have to ensure everybody is safe, not only customers but also our employees.”
Her team has been busy ensuring trucks are in good repair and equipped with chains, checking that snowcat vehicles and four-wheel drive forklifts are working and testing emergency generators. Snowshoes and ice cleats are now part of the district’s winter gear, and new rain gear designed to keep crews drier is on order.
Golde also has regular planning meetings with police, fire, Caltrans and other government agencies. She’s encouraged by the performance of SCE’s enhanced electric distribution equipment during a high-wind event in November.
“We’ve installed about 100 circuit miles of covered conductor (wire with a protective coating) in the district. During the last windstorm, everyone was concerned about trees falling and impacting our equipment. We had extra crews standing by in hotels, and we had just one repair order,” Golde said. “The grid hardening is working to improve reliability during fire season and winter storms.”
Golde is relieved that preliminary weather forecasts are not predicting a repeat of last year’s massive storms.
“We learned a lot of lessons from the storms last year,” Golde said. “Five feet of snow in a week — I don’t want to do that again.”
For important information about cold weather electrical safety, visit ENERGIZED’S How to Stay Safe from Winter Electrical Hazards.