Telluride – Mountain Village Reliability Project
Town of Telluride, San Miguel County: courtesy of San Miguel Website
If you happened to be in Telluride or Mountain Village during the President’s Day weekend in January 2016, you probably remember the power outage.
An electric transmission power pole in Ilium Valley was destroyed by a falling rock and the transmission and electric distribution lines were broken. Because the damaged lines comprised what engineers call a “radial feed” there was no backup.
Therefore, residents and businesses had to wait 23+ hours while crews from Tri-State and SMPA worked through the night to reinstall the power pole, electric power lines, and components. The event brought renewed attention the SMPA proposal called the “Telluride Mountain Village Reliability Project”.
The Telluride Mountain Village Reliability Project proposed to bury heavy electric power distribution lines capable of backing up the transmission line between the Sunshine and the Telluride substations. This redundant feed would allow one substation to cover the load of the other in case of failure. Moreover, because the new electric power line would be buried underground it would be invisible and invulnerable to such events as the infamous rockslide.
In order to proceed, SMPA needed to obtain permits from several entities and regulatory authorities. After submitting and revising the project plan, the necessary permits were finally issued toward the end of February 2016.
Next, SMPA selected a private contractor to construct the new distribution line.
Even with the construction schedule set, the work required road and trail closures. Residents were provided notice on variable message boards, temporary signs, public service newspaper and radio announcements along with postings at each Galloping Goose trailhead. No construction took place during any of the festivals.
The mountain towns were very supportive of operations crews during the long outage; now with a little more patience they can feel assured of continuous electric power with the redundant back-up in place.
The Telluride Mountain Village Reliability Project has provided an electric power line loop to connect to existing San Miguel Power Association (SMPA) service lines which serve the town of Telluride and parts of Mountain Village.
Ward Electric Company was awarded the installation project consisting of 5.5 miles of 24.9V carried by underground distribution lines.
2 dig crews and 2 terminating crews (approximately 10 people) from Ward Electric Company worked for about 6 – 8 weeks to complete the project.
The weather during that time of the construction was mostly clear with strong, steady winds. Only a few rainy days caused muddy working conditions. And a final inspection capped off the successful underground distribution line installation for the Telluride Mountain Village Reliability Project.