Work continues in Boerne’s northside and westside areas to improve our electric grid and increase its reliability.
For years now, Boerne Utilities has been making various improvements to our electric distribution system, with particular focus on the utility’s eight main feeder lines.
Since February, you might have seen crews out along School Street and Adler Road.
For many people at home, they will not notice anything, but behind the scenes we do want to tell you about the biggest safeguard they have in-place to avoid injury.
While crews are working, they must turn on the emergency disconnect system to the line they are working on. By doing that, it ensures should anything disrupt the line it will disconnect power. In many instances an animal, car crash, or other disturbance could cause an outage. It’s also possible that crewmember contacts a line, and the safety settings prevent the line from becoming re-energized while the crew is working on the line.
When the work is not happening, at night and on weekends, the system will operate as normal.
The project is expected to wrap up in a few weeks.
Our utility also does vegetation maintenance (tree trimming) efforts around electric distribution lines.
We have prioritized this program in recent years to prepare for severe weather events and it paid off in February when we only experienced a handful of minor outages during the winter weather.
We have also been replacing older power poles as time allows, intended to increase stability. Many lightning protection and wildlife intrusion prevention improvements have been made. We have updated our transformer sizing practices due to increased loading on customer services.