Power Outrage Aging Underground Power Lines Are Causing Repeated Blackouts For Hundreds Of Vera Customers

If Larry Miller lived out in the sticks, he’d expect a few power outages throughout the year.

After all, that’s the price of living in the country.

But Miller lives on Early Dawn Drive in the middle of a 20-year-old Spokane Valley neighborhoood, and the fact that his electricity has gone out as often as six times a month for the past seven years has him frustrated.

“We bought mostly battery-operated clocks because resetting them all became such a pain in the tush,” said Miller, 53.< The retired accountant wants to know why, in this day and age, he and his neighbors can’t get reliable power service.

He’s written a couple of letters to Vera Water and Power, which supplies his electricity, asking just that.

He’s also hired an attorney and is considering legal action.

“We’ve suffered damages because of this,” said Miller, who claims his personal computer has been damaged because of sudden blackouts.

Vera officials admit it’s a problem and say Miller’s case is indicative of troubles they’re having throughout their service grid.

Nearly 50 miles of transmission cables buried in the ground in the 1970s and early 1980s are starting to deteriorate, leading to outages all over Vera’s service area, they say.

Manager Kevin Wells said it’s a growing problem that could potentially affect thousands of Vera customers like Miller in the future.

Vera serves a good deal of the eastern end of the Valley, including many neighborhoods in the Evergreen area.

Nearly 3,500 of its 7,300 customers get their power through underground lines.

About 150 customers in Miller’s neighborhood alone are impacted by the deteriorating cables, Wells said.

“It’s just going to get worse and worse and worse,” said Wells, adding that repair crews are installing new lines in Miller’s neighborhood right now. “It’s not going away.”

The solution - replacing all the underground lines with new cables installed in protective tubes called conduits - is time-consuming and expensive, Wells said.

He estimated it would take between $3 million and $5 million to replace all the underground lines, a monumental number for a company with an annual capital budget of $600,000 to pay for all repairs throughout the system.

“Frankly, there’s not enough money to do it all,” Wells said. “We do the best we can with the time and money and materials we have.”

That’s not an adequate answer as far as Miller is concerned.

“Why are they providing electrical service to new customers that’s good, but they can’t take care of the people who have been there for years?” he said.

The dilemma is rooted in a building boom that hit the Valley in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Demand for underground utilities was high, and Vera officials decided to use a technique called “direct burial,” Wells said. The electrical cables were buried in trenches without being encased in conduits.

Those lines were supposed to last for 30 to 50 years but started coming apart much earlier, Wells said.

It’s a double-whammy for the power company, he added. Vera crews are spending a lot of time and money on quick fixes to the problem and aren’t able to save money for long term solutions, he said.

Early Dawn Drive has a half dozen patched holes in it where crews have been out to repair a broken line.

The company plans to attack neighborhoods where the problem is most severe now, and hopes to upgrade the entire system before things go completely haywire, Wells said.

“Until we have a problem in an area, we’re not going to deal with it,” he said. “It’s an industry-wide problem.”

Not so at Modern Electric, another Valley-based power company.

Manager Mike Baker said Modern has slowly been upgrading its underground lines for the past 15 years. Modern board members at the time thought that was the way to go, Baker said.

“It was a little expensive at the start, but it’s sure helping now,” Baker said. “We have a few problems here and there, but nothing that would overwhelm us.”

Miller is wishing Vera officials had had the same foresight.

“The only solution is for them to bite the bullet,” he said.

That would mean higher rates for customers, Wells said.

The only way the company can raise the kind of money necessary to complete such a project is by borrowing it or running a bond issue, he said. Either way, the customers will have to shoulder the cost.

“We’re a private firm,” Wells said. “There’s no other place for us to go other than the customers.”

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