By GWENDOLYN WEILER
Moapa Valley Progress
The stretch of Interstate 15 passing through the city of Mesquite was shut down and rerouted to Mesquite Blvd. on Tuesday and Wednesday nights last week. Overton Power District (OPD) employees worked tirelessly from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. on the nights of June 12 and June 13 to string a 69,000-volt power line across the freeway.
This stretch of powerline was one more step toward completing an electrical power loop around Mesquite that will ensure fewer residents are affected by power outages in the future, OPD officials said.
The work done last week marked the completion of the fourth of five phases in an on-going project, which started more than five years ago. The project is designed to give greater reliability to the growing city of Mesquite.
For example a car hit one of the boulevard poles years ago and broke it. “In order to do the work on it, we had to de-energize the line,” said Jensen, “which involved killing basically half of Mesquite until we got a new pole in place, and it takes a lot of hours to change a structure like that.”
In the future, the newly-constructed loop will allow OPD to isolate the problem area and fix it with fewer residents going without power.
That should come as good news to the city’s residents who have seen a massive influx of neighbors in recent years. As of 2017, the US Census Bureau estimates Mesquite’s population to be 18,541, which is a 21% increase since the 2010 census reported it to be 15,277.
Jensen, who’s been with OPD for thirty years, said OPD had been eyeing the loop project as long as he’s been there. But the timing never seemed quite right, he said. The first phase of the project, which required building an incoming line between two sub-stations that were part of the main feeder to Mesquite, finally began over five years ago. “The money was there, and the timing was right,” said Jensen.
The desire for improved reliability was by far the biggest contributor to the timing, said Jensen. But it was helped along by the fact that the old structure, erected about 20 years ago, needed to be replaced.
The previous poles, made of wood, had become infested with termites and were positioned at the highest point in Mesquite on top of a hill where they were most susceptible to lightning storms, said Jensen. The new structures are made of steel and placed approximately 50 feet lower on the hill.
The fifth and final phase of the project will take place over the course of the next six to eight months and entails tying the substations together so OPD can back-feed off different substations when one is compromised. However, everything will be done behind the scenes, said Jensen, and won’t require any planned outages or shutting down the interstate again.
