Crews Fear New Round Of Snow Tired Kootenai Electric Cooperative Crews Straining To Keep Up With Downed Lines

Shorn power poles, knots of twisted power lines and now this for power line crews working double-shifts: more snow.

“If we get 2 more inches tonight it’ll set the work we’ve been doing back at least a couple of days,” said Bill Shaffer, who worked 30 feet above Johnson Hill late Thursday.

With up to 4 inches forecast overnight, Kootenai County’s power picture could get even dimmer.

Shaffer shimmied down the Kootenai Electric Cooperative power pole after resetting the same line he’d fixed twice before. As soon as juice gets sent back through the repaired lines, they’re often coming right back down, he said.

For the 10 or so KEC crews working 16-hour days throughout the county, having to cover their tracks again and again has become a back-breaker.

But Shaffer and partner Hassel Dotson put smiles on their faces, gulped some Starbucks coffee and headed down the line to rehang more wires pulled to the ground by the weight of Tuesday’s ice storm.

“It’s the worst I’ve ever seen,” said Shaffer, a 20-year KEC veteran. “We’ll be out here another five days, at least.”

The fat snowflakes falling innocently Thursday night pushed leaning limbs closer to transmission and feeder lines around the area, foiling some of the work started Monday night by crews.

The work Shaffer and Dotson did Thursday afternoon could help send power 40 poles to the east in French Gulch.

“It’s bad, but it’s not as bad as things are on the east side of Lake Coeur d’Alene,” said Shaffer, speculating because much of that territory is served by Washington Water Power. “We heard they’ve got every line down over there. They could be looking at three weeks.”

The trouble spots for KEC include the area around Harrison and Rockford Bay, said Catherine Parochetti, spokeswoman for the utility. Power there will be out at least until the end of the weekend.

The east side of Hayden Lake and areas around Hauser Lake also are hit hard, and power may not be restored there until the middle of next week, she said.

“We’re making very good progress today,” Parochetti said Thursday. “We’ve got 95 percent of our system up.”

For Shaffer and Dotson, six hours of sleep will be a windfall anytime in the next week. Along with teetering tree trunks, the crews have to handle families who see the trucks next to their power lines and try to persuade them to get their power going.

“They’re real coy about it,” Shaffer said, using an orange “hot stick” to hook up wires to the pole assembly. “The real danger we get from people is generators.”

Families that use generators without turning off their main power box can send as much as 7,200 volts back through the power meter and onto the lines, Shaffer said, posing a serious hazard for line crews.

“The longer people are without power, the more likely they’ll go get a generator,” he said. “We hope they know what they’re doing.”

Both Dotson, who lives in Osburn, and Shaffer, who lives in Hayden Lake, have power at their homes.

The job has its moments, both say. Dotson, a hunter, enjoyed seeing an elk herd just a few hundred yards away from a line he was working on Wednesday.

The big overtime checks will come in handy next month. “It’s going to be a good Christmas for the Shaffer family,” Shaffer said.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo