Read about how FEMA and a rural electric cooperative arrived at a cost effective solution to a problem involving abandoned power lines and how it ended up providing new wildlife habitat.
The NorVal Electric Cooperative in Glasgow, Montana had a problem.
Five wooden power poles were tilted askew on soggy Boy Scout Island in the middle of the Missouri River after the 2011 floods.
They still carried power, but they could no longer be considered reliable. Fixing them would mean 1) lowering runoff from the Fort Peck Dam upstream, 2) hauling machines out to the island by boat, 3) operating the machines on water-soaked ground to dig new holes, and then 4) reducing the dam flow again to get the machines off the island. Then waiting for the next flood, when it would happen all over again.
NorVal Electric Manager Craig Herbert wanted to replace the line by boring under the river. That would cost less – $243,000 instead of $259,000 – and create a more reliable power line. Dave McNabb, the FEMA Public Assistance specialist working with Herbert, agreed.
“I told Dave I didn’t just want to rebuild the overhead, because I had a feeling this would not be my last flood,” Herbert recalls. “I wanted to directional bore under the island, so the line will last well beyond my lifetime and that of several of my employees here.”
One problem: hauling the poles off the island after the new line had been dug would take the same process as fixing them, in addition to using boats or cables to get the 35- and 60-foot poles back to the river banks, plus exposing workers to the danger of climbing up the unstable poles to detach the lines.
On the other hand, osprey – two-foot raptors sometimes called fish hawks or river hawks – love using towers to build their nests. Being in the middle of a river is even better, since their diet is almost entirely fish.
So Herbert, McNabb, and Tim Thennis of the Montana Disaster and Emergency Services came up with an idea. Why not remove the power lines, leave the towers for the osprey, and call it good?
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks all agreed.
As for removing the power lines without exposing the workers to danger – it turns out, to no one’s surprise, that Montana has sharpshooters willing to fire away at the insulators that hold the lines on the towers, so workers did not have to climb up to detach the lines.
So, in the summer of 2012, TCH Construction of Glasgow backed up about 50 feet from the river bank and began boring a six-inch hole through the bedrock beneath the Missouri. Once on the other side, the co-op hooked three 1 ¼ inch plastic pipelines together and pulled them back through the bore, creating its new conduit. The sharpshooters were turned loose, the old lines hauled away...
And the ospreys have returned to Boy Scout Island.