ROCHELLE – Rochelle Municipal Utilities on Monday presented a report from Fast Forward Lines on their recent inspections of utility infrastructure. Fast Forward Lines specializes in automated line patrol and thermal inspections, documenting pole and powerline conditions, cleaning up GIS data, and building system inventories. Their services provide electric utilities with actionable reports while reducing inspection costs and data volume. RMU received a report that identified 236 thermal anomalies, which were poles that overheated or had a loose connection.
It was estimated that fixing all of the problems currently discovered would be around $189,000, which is substantially less than having to make emergency repairs when they inevitably fail. During the survey, Fast Foward discovered a switch that was overheating feeding the power to the Ethanol Plant, preventing a catastrophic failure at the plant. RMU was alerted and scheduled an outage and made the repair.
Blake Toliver, Superintendent of Electric Operations and Generation, showed off a new device that uses a hammer to determine strength of power poles in order to prevent a future incident like the Spring Lake pole fall earlier this year. He said training is underway with the equipment before rollout next month. They hope to use it on at least 1,000 poles a year to start.
He said that the company will soon begin using a drone to inspect areas they couldn’t see from the road. Toliver hopes the city will consider doing a survey every three years or so.