Snow Patrol

EM meets with an ESB Networks crew who battled the elements in the Wicklow mountains recently

The snow storms of the first week in February brought the eastern half of the country to a near standstill. Tales of two mile motorway car trips taking up to four hours and more were not uncommon. Many people simply had to abandon their cars and make their way home as best they could on foot.

The mountain rescue services were also busy coming to the aid of stricken drivers and sightseers who had got stuck in snow drifts or simply lost though rescue teams had the training and equipment to cope with the conditions.

The ESB Network Services Overhead Lines crews equally had to brave the horrendous conditions to repair lines which had been brought down by the weather often wading through waist high snow for hundreds of metres across rough terrain carrying heavy equipment in doing so.

"It just had to be done," says Dermot Cunningham, a crew member based in Leopardstown in south Dublin. "When you see how isolated it can be for people living in the Dublin and Wicklow mountains, you realise how difficult it is to be without electricity, particularly in those conditions. We had to get out there to restore the power."

The crews based at Leopardstown had to bear the brunt of conditions as they are responsible for south Dublin and much of the north Wicklow area which were themselves the hardest hit areas because of their relatively high altitude. Kevin Gaffney is a Construction Supervisor, Overhead Lines, at Leopardstown. He recalls the day the floodgates opened. "The crews started work normally on the morning of Wednesday, February 4th going out on scheduled jobs and then the calls started coming in. The problem was that the faults were usually in inaccessible and remote areas in the mountains. The crews were having difficulty in getting their vehicles anywhere near the actual fault so they had to trek long distances through the snow with their equipment. They couldn't get their towers to the poles either so they had to carry ladders and harnesses with them and do everything manually.

And there was no let up! "The calls just kept coming in thick and fast as the day wore on. No sooner was a crew finished on one job than I'd have another job for them to go to," says Kevin. Often a job would require two crews. We also had two additional crews from Networks Projects and these were of invaluable help. It was fantastic the effort the crews put in. They had a few very tough days out there working until late at night and then out at first light again to get power restored to people as soon as possible."

"The worst job we had was Bohernabreena in the Dublin Mountains ""A job that" would have taken a few hours in normal conditions was taking a crew half a day just to get to and then a long time to repair. The crews did a really remarkable job under the conditions."

where two lines were down in the middle of a valley," Dermot Cunningham recalls. "The snow was up above our waists in places getting to the site." Fellow crew member, Harry Bailey, points out that their job was made more difficult by sightseers. "It wasn't just a case of having to dig our own vehicle out of the snow, our way was blocked by sightseers' cars which had got stuck and we had to dig them out as well to be able to move on. People go out in those conditions to take photographs – it causes huge problems for those of us in essential services who have to get through."

Having reached their destination the job was made immensely more difficult by a blizzard. "It wasn't snowing when we got there but then a blizzard started which lasted for about an hour. This made things very tough, it was hard to see what we were doing let alone make the repairs," says Stephen Leech, the third member of the crew.

Health and safety protocols must remain high even during these testing conditions as Kevin Gaffney explains. "When you've got a lot of faults during conditions like that and everyone is trying to restore power. This means that when a repair crew come to a cable it mightn't be live when they get there because of a different fault at a transformer. Someone else is working on that fault so that cable could become live again at any time if the right systems aren't in place."

This system involves Hold Off Notices which are affixed to the poles affected by the fault. Each notice has the name of the person responsible for the repair and the restoration of power to the affected line. "If your name isn't on that notice you don't touch the job," says Kevin. "Safety is paramount here."

The actual repair job in Bohernabreena was completed as much by the sweat of the two crews involved as by their expertise. "We had to physically pull the two sections of line together to repair them," says Stephen. "We had no mechanical equipment to help us. It was very hard work, particularly when you're walking over ground that you can't see because of the snow."

"It was certainly a challenge," says Harry. "But that's our job. There was a great sense of satisfaction when we got power restored to customers. Lots of them came out to thank offer us tea and express appreciation. It's at times like this that you realise how much electricity means to people. That said I'm glad we only get weather like this every 20 years."

That gratitude was also reflected by amount of calls to ESB's National Customer Contact Centre complimenting the crews on their efforts. "People do appreciate the work of the crews, as do I," says Kevin Gaffney. "When the storms hit they just get out there and get on with it."

EM