News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
CEC spokesman Alan Guggenheim in front of berms created to mitigate impacts on neighbors’ views.
Almost all the construction is complete and landscape berms are newly planted. The Central Electric Cooperative's Tollgate substation is set to go on line this fall.
CEC is waiting for one last piece of equipment that was delayed in coming from the manufacturer.
"We're about a month-and-a-half, two months from completely energizing and basically saying we're done," said CEC spokesman Alan Guggenheim.
One major feature of the new substation is completed. The Deschutes County Hearings Officer required CEC to create six-foot tall landscaped berms to partially obscure the substation from the views of residents whose homes at the edge of the subdivision look out onto the massive new steel structure.
Sisters Landscaping Company last week planted the berms with native grasses, sage, Oregon grape and other indigenous species. Three weeks ago, CEC reached an agreement allowing the utility to irrigate the berms using Tollgate water.
"We'll water according to the rules of the homeowners' association," Guggenheim said. "We'll irrigate pretty intensively for the next couple of weeks. Nature takes over at a certain point and determines what is going to take root and what the deer are going to eat."
Project manager M.L. Norton noted that "the deer have already been up on the berms eating the tall grasses."
In addition to the landscaping, the structure is constructed of brown steel and the security fence is laced with brown slats in an effort to reduce the visual impact.
"The brown really does fade into the forest like we hoped," Norton said.
Neighbors recognize the work that has been done, but it does little to mitigate their concern over having the large structure looming just beyond their back yards.
"I admit they did a good job on the berm," said David Banks, who lives immediately across the access road from the substation. "But it's still pretty horrendous out there... We're still on pins and needles to see how much noise the facility makes."
Ardie Winters is unimpressed.
"There's no way a six-foot berm that's not planted with trees can cover 28-foot steel structures 30 feet from the house," she said.
Right now, she said, the deciduous trees in her back yard block much of the view of the structure.
"As soon as those leaves fall, it's just ugly," she said.
"I'll learn to live with it; I'll have to. But at the point when I have to sell my property, it's going to be a nightmare."
The station took about 8,000 man hours in its construction. The transformer unit, weighing 100,000 pounds, was shipped from Monterrey, Mexico, to Redmond, then out to Sisters where it was trucked in along Cold Springs Road and other logging roads to get it to the substation site. There, a crane lifted it into position.
The site will have tightly restricted entry for employees of CEC and is strictly off-limits to anyone else. CEC is concerned about kids playing on the berms and want everyone to keep away from the substation.
"It's not a place for the public and it's not a place for kids," Guggenheim said. "For their own safety, we don't want anybody any closer than the (far side) of the berms."
The new substation will be brought online to run 69kv power until the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) switches the area to 115 kv in two to three years.
The City of Sisters has already been switched over to 115 KV.
Once the new substation is operational, the current substation will be dismantled.
Guggenheim said that once the system is completely converted to 115kv power, the system will be more reliable and more redundant, reducing or eliminating outages due to overload, and making outages due to weather or accidents less lengthy.
Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.
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