A team of linemen from Eastsound repaired an underwater cable that failed in Cascade Lake on Sunday, May 15. Power was quickly rerouted from the Olga substation to serve those affected by the outage, which last about two hours.

After surveying the situation on Sunday, the crew arrived Monday morning to tackle the problem. Steve Eyler (General Foreman), Dan Watters (Substation Technician), Roger Sandwith (Journeyman Lineman) and Matt Minnis (Apprentice) engineered a creative strategy to locate and repair the damaged cable. First, they located the end of thecable near the shore and dug a trench in the shallows to access it. Then they used the big digger truck to help pull thecable up near the shore, put cable guides on a floating dock section, and then towed the dock along the cable lay pullingthe cable up to examine it until the fault was located. They were able to make repairs to the cable on the float, on thelake and restore power later that day.

OPALCO’s distribution system includes 1,146 miles of power lines (82% underground); 14 miles of that is coveredby 15 submarine cables. A capital improvement project is underway to lay underground cable around the lake andeventually retire the submarine cable.