Into the Ice Storm: OTEC crew battle brutal conditions to help fellow utility
By Joe Hathaway on Wednesday, January 17th, 2024 in More Top Stories Northeastern Oregon News
LANE COUNTY — Electric utilities across Oregon are rallying this week as a winter storm devastates most of the state.
One of those utilities is Oregon Trail Electric Cooperative, which sent a five-man lineman crew to Lane County after fellow cooperative Lane Electric – based in Eugene – sent out a call for assistance on Saturday, January 13 after ice and snow storms caused significant damage to its infrastructure throughout its service territory, leaving over 5,000 households out of power.
“It’s a mess over here, there’s one to two inches of ice on everything,” said Blake Eckstein, district foreman for OTEC who’s leading the crew in Lane County.
OTEC answered the call for help as part of a mutual aid agreement through the Oregon Cooperative Network. Over the past several years OTEC has sent crews to assist with other winter storm and wildfire restoration efforts.
The OTEC crew consists of Eckstein, who works out of OTEC’s La Grande office, Chris Peppers from Baker City, Travis Smart from La Grande, Orrin Ledgerwood from John Day and Devan Attleberger from Burns.
Before committing resources to mutual aid requests, OTEC says it ensured it has ample crews available for all local needs, including the utility’s own outage mitigation. Since OTEC currently has available resources and manpower to not only staff each district but also send aid, the decision was made to send a crew into the storm to help.
The crew arrived over the weekend and immediately set out to help Lane Electric rebuild lines and restore power in forested areas outside of Eugene.
“It’s pretty devastating. You can’t go a quarter mile without seeing a tree through a line,” said Eckstein. “Every road and street looks like an ice skating rink and I’m seeing people slip left and right, so it’s a lot to deal with, but we’re used to it.”
No doubt this crew is used to it. The five men are veteran linemen at OTEC, and are used to restoring outages during harsh eastern Oregon winters. But despite being hardened to working in freezing conditions, Blake says they still face challenges over on the west side.
“We just don’t get the ice like they do over here and they have so much more tree exposure than we do at home,” said Eckstein. “When they do get something like this, the outages are amplified because of all their tree exposure.”
Blake says while they’re over there, they’ll be working 16 hour shifts, with 8 hours of rest until they can help restore all power to Lane Electric’s customers.
He says it’s tough work restoring lines in these dangerous conditions, but it’s all part of the job.
“It’s called doing one’s duty. When you get called and it’s your turn, you go and you help where you can,” said Eckstein. “If it gets bad enough in our home territory, we would hope that other utilities would send the aid our way to help get everybody back on as well.”
