Some of this area’s salt marshes are being well protected despite the construction of a high-voltage power line that will run from the Tradepoint Industrial Park in Liberty County to the Burnt Church Substation off Ga. 144 in Bryan County.
By land, workers are able to operate in the salt marshes without damaging them with the use of Hydratek multi-purpose vehicles.
The crew and equipment carriers produce low ground pressure by operating on treads when the earth is firm underneath. They are also propeller driven for use in water-covered areas.
As innovative as the Hydrateks are, however, they’re less visually impressive than the Erickson Air Crane helicopter being used to transport equipment and put transmission-line poles in place along the marshes.
The project, designed to increase reliability and help prevent possible overloads and outages in the area, is a first for Georgia Transmission, the power-line construction, maintenance and operation company doing the work.
“We have never used this air crane before. We have never constructed a line in the salt marsh before,” said public affairs director Jeannine Hayes.
The 25,000-pound air crane has a maximum payload of just more than 20,000 pounds.
The air crane, working from a landing site near Interstate-95 exit 76 in Liberty County, delivers the equipment used to insert the base of the 7,000-pound steel poles into the ground to locations that cannot be accessed by ground.
It then returns to the landing site where ground workers attach its rigging to the base of a pole, flies back to the pole location, lowers the base into position where it is pushed into the ground by a device Hayes described as part hammer, part vibrator.
The crane then brings the upper portion of the pole which fits like a sleeve over the base. Once the upper portion is in place, the entire process begins again some 500 to 600 feet farther down the line.
Planning for the $20 million project began in 2008. It took the company four years to evaluate the alternative routes, conduct public meetings, finalize the route, acquire easements and obtain permits.
It will have taken a little more than one more year to clear the land, erect the poles and string the wire by the time it is finished in October.
The entire project will span 12.2 miles (6.5 miles in Bryan County) and utilize 102 steel or concrete poles from 80 to 100 feet high.
Coastal EMC’s Mark Bolton, which provides electricity to parts of both Liberty and Bryan counties, said the project is part of Georgia Transmission’s infrastructure improvement program.
“It is part of a long-term program designed to strengthen the (electrical) grid,” he said.
Hayes described it as an “important reliability project.”
“Right now both these substations are being fed by one source. On the power grid you want to have redundancies. If something happens with this line coming out of Riceboro that feeds the Tradepoint Industrial Park substation, you want to be able to back feed it. That is what this is going to provide for both of these substations,” she said.
Georgia Transmission, owned by the state’s Electric Membership Cooperatives, owns 3,000 miles of transmission lines and 600 substations that deliver power to the state’s 38 EMC’s.
“We build the high-voltage lines for the EMCs. We are building and will operate and maintain this transmission line,” Hayes said.
The entire project will span 12.2 miles (6.5 miles in Bryan County) and utilize 102 steel or concrete poles from 80 to 100 feet high.