Helicopter crews hired to wash insulators

GALVESTON — The extreme Texas drought has electricity providers for the first time hiring helicopter crews to spray-wash salt, sand and other contamination from transmission towers.

The measure helps ensure reliable sources of power when normal rainfall isn’t enough to do the job, officials said.

Galveston’s rainfall totals have dwindled each year since Hurricane Ike’s Sept. 13, 2008, landfall, according to the National Weather Service in League City. Companies, such as CenterPoint Energy and Texas-New Mexico Power Co., hired helicopter crews for the first time to clean electrical insulators atop transmission towers, officials said.

Keith Gray, a spokesman for CenterPoint Energy, said employees couldn’t remember a time in at least the last four decades ever using helicopters to clean insulators.

Larry Karm, contract coordinator for CenterPoint Energy, said the company in the early 1980s used bucket trucks to clean the debris-coated insulators during a period of drought.

“We have such a great salt buildup, it forms contamination and it compromises the insulation value of that insulator,” Gray said. “We’ve had such severe drought that this became a situation that we want to be proactive with.”

Texas-New Mexico Power Co. used a helicopter last week to clean lines on the FM 528 and FM 518 corridor through League City, Friendswood and Alvin. The company also is using helicopters for the first time, spokeswoman Valerie Smith said.

“The drought being experienced is unprecedented, so the actions we are having to take are also, in many cases, unprecedented,” Smith said.

Helicopters can clean lines where bucket trucks can’t reach. CenterPoint also uses helicopters to clean transmission insulators across the Galveston Causeway, avoiding the expense of working from a barge.

“We’ll continue this until we start getting a decent amount of rain,” Gray said.

Pilot Patrick Dickie, a helicopter pilot of 20 years, 11 in the power line business, works for Air2 under a contract with CenterPoint Energy.

On Tuesday, the crew flew in a McDonnell Douglas 500 helicopter outfitted with an 80-gallon water tank to spray near lines carrying 138,000 kilovolts near Stewart and 13 Mile roads, Dickie said.

“We can normally, with the fiberglass boom, get about 5 inches away from that, which cleans contamination rather rapidly,” Dickie said. “The boom puts out about 400 to 600 (pounds per square inch). So, it’s fairly powerful, peels the contamination off quickly.”

Drought conditions since April have led to salt and sand contamination buildup on transmission lines, which interrupted power sources to several refineries in Texas City and disrupted service to residents across the county.

“The rainfall deficit is already equal to what we were at last year and it’s not getting any better,” Josh Lichter, a meteorologist with the weather service, said of this year’s rain totals.

The reasons for the dry spell are varied, Lichter said.

“What’s going on this year is probably related to La Niña — that pattern in the Pacific Ocean that favors drier winters and springs for us,” Lichter said.

Strong high pressure across Texas and the Southern states has kept the jet stream to the north, Lichter said.

“If it comes farther south, it would allow fronts coming through with storms, but what happened so far this year is all dry cold fronts,” Lichter said. “We got cold temperatures, but just no rain with these fronts.”