Greetings!
Today was an eventful morning at the lighthouse. The WPS contractor arrived early to cut a trench across the road to route the high voltage power feed to the other side of the road where a transformer was to be installed. It took less than 15 minutes to trench, place the conduit with the power cable in the trench, and backfill the trench. No vehicles on the road were impacted while this was done. The road was patched with cold mix asphalt. One vehicle had to wait a couple minutes while that was going on. The cold mix asphalt is a temporary patch. Someone will come back later to use permanent asphalt to complete the job.
The three workers from Miller Pipeline (WPS’s contractor) did a great job. They started at 7:30 a.m. and had the transformer in place by 11:00 a.m. They trenched from the lighthouse to the transformer location and installed conduit between the two endpoints. Then the 240 volt secondary cable was pushed through the conduit to connect the transformer to the meter pedestal on the lighthouse.
It was rather interesting when they were excavating at the meter pedestal. They came across drain tiles that we didn’t know existed. Apparently they go from the well around the winter kitchen crawl space vents and to a French drain. We have no idea when or who put them in. The contractor will wait until next week to backfill this area so we can repair the connection.
Something else I learned today is that the high voltage feed conduit already has the high voltage cable inside the conduit. It does not need to be pulled through the buried conduit. It is already there and that makes the job much faster.
The crew planned to spend the rest of the day at the Welker’s Point end to continue trenching and installing the power feed moving forward to the connection location at Welker’s Point campground. They will not be working tomorrow and will return after Labor Day.
We are very close to having electricity at EBLS.
Ed