It’s the woodpeckers’ fault

Woodpeckers. They’re the ones who caused San Juan County residents to be without electric power three consecutive Fridays, from midnight until 5 a.m.

For some time the woodpeckers have been pecking holes in poles on Lopez Island that support transmission lines which carry electricity to the entire county. When they reached the point that the poles were in danger of breaking, Orcas Power and Light Cooperative officials realized they had no choice but to turn off the power and replace the poles with steel ones.

Initially, they had their doubts that woodpeckers were the guilty parties. Typically, woodpeckers go after insects that reside inside trees, yet there is no evidence of any insects living inside these poles. Moreover, the poles were made of cedar and treated with a substance that makes them resistant to bugs, Operations Manager Pete Stoothoff said.

Eventually, however, OPALCO management was forced to conclude that the reports were true. They maintained hope for a while that they could get the birds to take their pecking elsewhere by employing less dramatic measures. But nothing worked, General Manager Randy Cornelius said.

Meanwhile, the holes kept getting bigger, and by spring some had become as big as eight to nine inches in diameter, and increasingly deep, according to Mark Tilstra, OPALCO’s manager of engineering.

Line crews from all three islands were on Lopez May 14, with flood lights strategically in place, so they could replace what amounted to 10 damaged poles with steel ones. Crews from San Juan joined their Lopez colleagues on May 21 to continue the work, while the Orcas linemen used the outage to make some much needed improvements at the Olga and Eastsound substations. This past Friday, the Orcas crews went to Lopez, while their San Juan counterparts did some work at the Roche Harbor substation.

No additional outages have been scheduled, but Stoothoff says it’s all but certain that other cedar poles will have to be replaced in the next couple years. “I don’t see an end to it,” he said, explaining that the problem seems to exist all over Lopez Island.

Cornelius predicts that the day is coming when all the poles will be made of steel. But he said that’s a long way down the road.

The work during the three outages cost OPALCO about $8,000, including labor, to replace each pole, Tilstra said.

The job was scheduled for a time when the weather typically is comfortable, and on weekday nights, when the number of tourists visiting the islands is relatively small.

Few, if any islanders complained about being inconvenienced because of the outages, Tilstra said.

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