PONCE, Puerto Rico (Dec. 24, 2017) – In an effort to help Puerto Rican citizens recover from devastation in the wake of Hurricanes Irma and Maria, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Task Force Power Restoration continues its mission to restore the island’s electrical power grid.
It’s a mission with a daunting challenge: how do you procure thousands of tons of critical materials from throughout the nation, transport them across vast miles of water and into the hands of work crews?
That’s where the Ponce lay-down yard and warehouse come in.
The Ponce site is the team’s focal point for amassing an increasing inventory of critical power grid materials, including thousands of wooden, concrete and steel utility poles and hundreds of massive coils of heavy high tension wire. At the warehouse, tons of smaller grid components, transformers, conductors, insulators and electric regulators are among the items housed.
Robert Govero, a Corps logistics management specialist working at the lay-down yard, stated that when their mission to restore Puerto Rico’s power grid began, it took time to spin-up and get these critical materials flowing in mass to the island.
After scouring the nation to obtain needed quantities of grid components, the team has seen a marked increase in the amount of materials arriving to support the mission.
The utility poles, wire coils and other component materials are barged down the Atlantic Ocean from Jacksonville, Florida, to the San Juan Port, where they are carefully inventoried and off-loaded onto semi-trucks for delivery to Ponce.
Once a request is received through the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, the warehouse team quickly assembles the material request onto pallets for pick up.
“We maintain 100 percent accountability of every item, from the smallest electrical component to the 5,500-pound concrete utility pole, until it arrives at the delivery site, is stored and ultimately issued to the workforce,” said Daniel Brown, TF Power Restoration bill of materials accountable officer.
During the last 72 hours, said Brown, more than 70,000 items have been packed up for issue to the workforce.
“Last Friday, 20 truckloads of material was delivered to the workforce,” added Brown.
Plans are underway to stand up a second lay-down yard in San Juan to speed delivery and make the process more efficient.
As the workforce of Task Force Power Restoration continues to work 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, USACE Chief of Engineers, Lt. Gen Todd T. Semonite, visited the team Dec. 21, and spoke about their critical mission.
“We don’t do grids,” said Semonite. “The Department of Energy does grids.”
The chief revealed that, “Eight days into the storm, while talking with the White House, the DOE said, ‘We aren’t going to be able to handle this. We are very, very good at when something goes wrong in Florida, we call up a bunch of states and they drive 800 pole trucks down. You flood Florida with pole trucks and you drive poles in and it all works out and it’s a lot more resilient.’
“This was devastating,” said Semonite. “The nation’s toughest challenge: rebuild the grid in Puerto Rico…we [DOE] can’t figure that out. So Corps, step up and work it out.”
Semonite said that, given the enormous scope of work, USACE estimates 75 percent of the island’s power grid is tracking to be online by the end of January 2018; 95 percent by the end of February, and any other remaining remote sites completed by May.
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