Restoring power outages starts here

  • By Eric Fetters / Herald Writer
  • Sunday, December 31, 2006 9:00pm
  • Business

ARLINGTON – Even in a digital age, to keep our households and businesses humming as usual, it all comes down to countless wooden poles.

As the snowstorm and winds reminded local utilities during recent weeks, those humble power poles are vital to keeping on residents’ lights and heat.

Which is why a few more people might now appreciate the unglamorous business JH Baxter does at its Arlington plant.

There, about three dozen employees fashion Douglas fir and cedar logs into power poles for utilities around the nation.

Generally, December is the business’ slowest month, said Todd Kunzman, local director of operations for JH Baxter. But when forecasters began giving warning of the coming windstorm in the days before Dec. 14, the workers in Arlington sped up production.

One of the company’s longtime customers is Puget Sound Energy, the main electrical utility for the hard-hit Seattle suburbs and Whidbey Island.

“We generally carry an emergency stock for PSE,” Kunzman said. “And with the weather this year, we stocked some extra emergency sizes as well.”

And while plenty of businesses in the eastern suburbs of Seattle shut down due to the widespread power outage, JH Baxter’s workers stepped up their pace. In the week following the storm, Baxter shipped 500 poles just to Puget Sound Energy – about seven times the normal volume shipped from the plant in an average week.

“They met our needs, which was great. It was a huge convenience and relief to us they are so close and could get the poles to us right away,” said Puget Sound Energy spokeswoman Dorothy Bracken.

Overall, the utility ended up replacing more than 1,000 power poles in its territory, Bracken added.

Last week, when JH Baxter’s Arlington plant had originally planned to be closed, workers instead worked to replenish Puget Sound Energy inventory of poles, Kunzman said.

One of just a few major power pole producers in Western Washington, California-based JH Baxter has owned the Arlington plant since 1970. Most of the workers have been there for years, Kunzman said.

Which helps, he added, because it turns out that creating a power pole involves more than cutting a log to length and shipping it out.

First off, there’s not just one or two standard sizes for power poles.

“For utility poles, there are about 130 different lengths and classes. Each utility has its own standards,” Kunzman said.

And the standards for where to drill electrical equipment mounting holes in the poles and other details also vary widely. Different utilities in different climates also request various coating treatments for the poles; they’re not all just covered with creosote anymore.

Kunzman said he expects the plant’s production to return to more normal levels in the coming weeks. But if there’s another big storm lurking out there, ready to knock out power again, “we’ll be ready,” he said.

Reporter Eric Fetters: 425-339-3453 or fetters@heraldnet.com.

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