X

It could havebeen worse.

That’s not really much consolation for most of what’s gone horribly wrong in 2020, but it’s definitely the mantra Cimarron Electric Cooperative management and employees — and likely many of its member customers — are reciting about October’s ice storm.

The total damage estimates gathered up in response to the Presidential disaster declaration issued last week solidify what anecdotal evidence had already proven:

The “Shocktober Surprise” ice storm just before Halloween could have been much, much worse.

“Looking at the bills that have come in and what is left to do to get the affected area of our system back to pre-storm condition, a good estimate of the total cost of the October storm will be just over $5 million,” Cimarron CEO Mark Snowden said Monday.

To put that in perspective, Snowden said the repair bill for the 2002 ice storm, which left portions of the cooperative’s nine-county service area without power for more than a month, was just shy of $38 million .

Snowden and Chief Operating Officer Jeff Hyatt credit the cooperative’s forward-thinking board of directors and a massive capital investment in the last decade with making the difference.

“We’ve done two things over the last 10 years system hardening and vegetation management,” Snowden said.

Vegetation management involves a consistent and concerted effort to keep trees and shrubs growing near electric lines trimmed.

System hardening refers to the replacement of 1,259 miles of poles and lines — about one-fourth of Cimarron’s 4,500-mile system that includes about 15,500 electric meters.

Why Hardening Is So Hard

The new poles installed during the three-year hardening process included creosote-coated wood poles placed closer together and interspersed every quarter mile with poles made of ductile iron.

Ductile iron has been around since the 1950s and is frequently used to construct pipes for municipal water systems.

The characteristics of this metal composite — flexibility as well as durability — would seem to make its use in constructing utility poles a no-brainer.

Those poles in the center of every half-mile run of lines act as a stopgap when the tension created by the weight of one falling pole triggers a domino effect that pulls down its neighbors.

Even so, Cimarron Electric had obstacles to overcome to be able to utilize the hardened poles in its system.

The first of these were restrictions placed by the Rural Electric Association, which was the source of the cooperative’s financing at the time.

“We had to build to government specs to get loan funds through the REA and the government wouldn’t loan money for the ductile poles,” Snowden said. “Everything we were wanting to do to make the system more reliable just got a no, no, no from the government.”

So Cimarron’s board of directors voted to refinance its debt through the Cooperative Finance Corporation, a member-owned lending institution incorporated by rural electric cooperatives.

“After running the numbers several times, the board had a window to refinance all our debt through the CFC in 2012 and save $1 million,” Snowden said. “Now the board has control to design how the system is engineered.”

Even with favorable interest rates and a cooperative lender, the size of the debt required to finance the rehardening of just a fourth of the poles — about $69 million — was itself an obstacle.

But that’s also about the time the Federal Emergency Management Agency decid-ed the government could save some money by not having to replace critical infrastructure every time a major storm blew in.

Not All Storms Are Ice Storms

“If you talk to oldtimers who’ve been with Cimarron forever, they’ll tell you that ice storms used to be really rare,” Snowden said. “In fact, the 2002 ice storm was called the storm of the century around here.

“What we’ve seen since then is that it wasn’t the 100-year storm. We’ve had so many FEMA events since then — more ice storms, tornados, floods, you name it.”

After another ice storm in 2013 was followed by a string of devastating hurricanes, “FEMA was getting tired of spending all that money rebuilding the same infrastructure over and over and decided to offer mitigation programs to allow utilities to harden their systems on a 75-25 % cost share basis,” Snowden said.

Based on the path of the 2013 storm, FEMA identified the 1,259 miles of line in the Cimarron system that would qualify for the cost share program.

But Cimarron’s 25 % share was still $17 million, “a big swallow,” Hyatt said.

The board approved participation in the mitigation program with no reserva-tions and the project was completed by 2016.

Any new lines constructed since that time are also built to the same standard, Hyatt said.

Worth the Investment?

Running an electric cooperative is a balancing system involving a triad of obligations to member customers.

“We are committed to being affordable, reliable and accountable,” Hyatt said. “We could make the best system out there, but that wouldn’t be affordable and we wouldn’t be accountable to our members.”

Snowden and Hyatt were keenly aware of that balance when they recommended investing in the expensive hardening process.

A few storm events since 2016 demonstrated that the new system was strong, but it was October’s early ice storm “when we found out how really strong it was,” Snowden said.

The evidence came in the bottom eight miles or so of lines in Cimarron’s system that did not fall in the footprint of the 2013 storm.

“The lines from Geary to Piedmont to Guthrie did not qualify for that hardening project and we spent 11 days putting those poles and lines back up (after the October storm),” Snowden said. By comparison, damage to the hardened portions of the system was minimal.

“The new system fl exed its muscles through the whole thing,” he said. “That was government money well spent.”

A photo captured by one of Cimarron’s linemen three miles south of the Calumet substation was worth a 1,000 words (see photo above). Many of the poles on one side of the road which belong to another utility are broken or laid flat, while Cimarron’s hardened poles on the other side are all still standing.

Help from the Oil Boom

From the first rumblings of an impending oil boom in the STACK play, Cimarron’s management and board went to work to prepare for the spike in demand for new utility construction to drilling sites, saltwater disposal wells, rail terminals and other energy infrastructure.

Careful planning and effi cient staff and inventory management has allowed the cooperative to plow the infusion of oil-related revenue into providing more reliable electrical service for all customers, Snowden said.

Which gets us right back to that tree-trimming issue.

Even on calm and cloudless days, tree limbs growing over and between electric lines contribute to outages just by giving squirrels easier access to do their damage.

When the wind starts blowing and limbs make contact with lines, more spot outages can occur.

But during winter storms, when ice starts accumulating on trees and overhanging branches begin snapping from the growing weight, “they pull lines and poles and everything down with them,” Snowden said.

In storms like the rare October ice event, when trees hadn’t shed their leaves and had much more surface area for ice to cling to, overgrown limbs are even more destructive.

“If we are going to harden our system without also keeping the trees trimmed, we’re just wasting everyone’s money,” Snowden said.

So the board has made a commitment to the tune of $1.5 million a year to keep trees trimmed away from the cooperative’s electric lines in a systematic process.

“We couldn’t have spent that much if it wasn’t for the oil boom,” Snowden said. “I never want it to sound like we are better than previous generations of management.”

The oil boom also financed renovations in the headquarters building north of Kingfisher, including a situation control room, where operations controllers work 24/7 in the immediate aftermath of a storm to monitor emergency calls and plot outages on giant screens.

Other renovation upgrades include a warehouse to store parts and materials, with drive-up access for easier loading of trucks and computerized inventory control.

A paper wall map with color-coded push pins identifying outages has been replaced with an interactive computer program, where Chief Technical Officer Steph Jones has mapped every pole, transformer and substation.

With information provided from the field, the map displays real-time data of not only every outage location, but also the precice materials required to make the repairs.

All those combined updates mean that when storms strike, crews starting 6 a.m. shifts can be dispatched to start repairs with fully loaded trucks by 6:45 a.m., compared to 8 a.m. in pre-automation days, Hyatt said.

Back to Number Crunching

Snowden said Tuesday that over the last two months Cimarron has identifi ed another 400 miles of line that might qualify for hardening in FEMA’s mitigation cost-share program.

But in the current climate of an oilfi eld slump and pandemic-impacted businesses, the estimated $6-8 million of debt required for the cooperative’s share of the cost may tip the reliability-accountability-affordability balance.

“From a reliability standpoint, we would love to complete another strengthening project, this time on the southern and eastern edge of our service territory,” Snowden said. “But taking on more debt at this time will have to be looked at very closely.

“The board has most of 2021 to make this decision and we look for them to take their time and see how our fi nances and sales numbers come in during 2021 before deciding.”

Why No Burried Lines

One system-enhancing suggestion that will never pass the reliability-accountability-affordability balance test is the idea of burying electric lines to protect them from storm damage.

Conservative estimates place the cost of burying lines at about $1 million per mile, an expense impossible to recoup in potential future savings, Snowden said.

“In some areas we serve, we may only have one house on a mile stretch of line,” Snowden said.

Buried lines in Oklahoma also are subject to nonstorm damage every hot summer when drought causes the ground to crack and shift.

“Critters also get into lines underground and outages which might take a couple hours to restore in an above-ground line stretch into a couple of days when you’re talking about having to excavate to make a repair.”

“When you’re talking about an expense that would increase every member’s bill by an average of $250, it’s just not worth it,” Hyatt added.