Gibson EMC Repairs Ice Damage With Help from GeoNav
Gibson EMC Repairs Ice Damage With Help from GeoNav
May 8, 2009--Charles Phillips has a tough job. As vice president of engineering and information technology at Gibson Electric Membership Corporation, an NRTC member, Phillips spends most of his days helping to operate and maintain a complex, six-county electrical grid in western Tennessee—no small task. But in late January, after torrents of ice coated most of Gibson's service territory, his job got a lot tougher.
"Over 1,200 miles of lines were affected by the storm," said Phillips. "That's over a third of all of our lines."
With damage that Gibson's President and CEO Dan Rodamaker called the worst in the cooperative's 72-year history, Phillips needed help to restore power to customers—and fast.
Cooperatives and municipal power companies from neighboring territories came in to help Gibson with repair efforts, but coordinating 150 linemen in 40 or more crews was a challenge.
"At first, we had a Gibson employee assigned to each visiting crew to help them find their way around,” Phillips said. “This limited the number of outside crews we could bring in and effectively manage. And, for our employees who typically work on the southern end of our system, just finding the locations where we needed work performed was sometimes a challenge.”
Fortunately, just before the storms struck, Gibson had begun trialing two of NRTC's GeoNav units, specially outfitted GPS units that help coordinate utility work. Phillips realized that the units could direct Gibson's repair teams to outage areas, and crews from other areas wouldn't need a Gibson employee to help them.
Gibson called NRTC for more GeoNav units pre-loaded with the cooperative's own mapping data. NRTC expedited them to the cooperative. The units contained detailed information about the cooperative's system, including the location of poles, lines, substations and other field assets. With the units in the hands of visiting crews, power was restored to the last customer less than two weeks after the storm.
“We could just give a list of work to the people who came to help and the unit would take them right to the place where they needed to be,” Phillips said. "No wasting time."
"Some of the [linemen] went from saying [about GeoNav] 'It's okay' to 'I love it!'" Phillips said. “[GeoNav] probably paid for itself in one event. Though, I haven't had time to figure that out just yet!"
To learn more about GeoNav from NRTC and how it can help your utility, contact your regional business manager.
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