The Nugget Newspaper - News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon

The two main roads near the entrance to Black Butte Ranch have been torn up the past three weeks for the replacement of underground electrical conduit.

"We have about another two weeks to go," said Travis Kinder, foreman with Robinson & Owen, Inc. of Sisters, contractors for the extensive trenching job. "And that is predicting fair weather."

The project started at Curly Dock Road and runs along the recently renamed Bishop's Cap (formerly Hawks Beard) on the western side of the ranch. It extends almost two-thirds of a mile past the Black Butte Ranch General Store and half way to the BBR Lodge.

Two six-inch and two four-inch conduit pipes are to be laid in the 4-1/2-foot-deep trench through which new electric lines will be pulled.

In addition to half-a-dozen workers, Robinson and Owen have two excavating machines, a backhoe and two end-dump trucks on the site.

"So far the job has gone real good," said Kinder. "The people here in the Ranch have been very cooperative and the residents have not pressed us when traffic needed to be held up. We even worked with another contractor crew who were doing a major remodeling job on a large house right along our route.

"They had to have access over our ditch to continue to get in to their job."

The project is being underwritten by Central Electric Cooperative and the conduit piping will be used exclusively by them.

"We have word that what we are replacing has been here, underground, for between 25 and 28 years," Kinder said.

Dale Larson, long-time maintenance and operations manager for Black Butte Ranch, confirmed that the old pipe was buried soon after he arrived in 1972.

"I think it's been there for about 30 years," he said.

It is amazing that the electrical system has worked with as few problems as were experienced over that length of time, a spokesman for CEC pointed out.

"What we have today in underground wiring is 10 times better than it was a quarter-century ago," the spokesman said.

Seven four-foot-by-five-foot cement vaults will be installed along the route for connections and easy access to the system.

A CEC crew with a truck holding four giant drums of cable is following closely behind the trenching crew and pulling new power cables through the newly laid conduit. A series of transformers and other electrical controls will be set in the vaults by CEC.

A six-inch base of gravel will be poured over the refurbished trench, as specified by Larson, and then Hap Taylor and Sons, paving contractors, will lay down a new, 12-foot wide asphalt hiking and biking trail along the same right-of-way as the previous footpath.

According to Larson, who is overseeing the entire project for the Ranch, "everything should be back to normal by Memorial Day."