Making sure the power gets to the people in rural communities.

AltaLink Director of Stakeholder Engagement and Special Initiatives Mark Johns says transmission line inspection season is just around the corner.

“Once a year, in the fall, all of our power lines are flown with a helicopter and we inspect our power lines,” says Johns. “What we have to do is we have people qualified to inspect the facilities to look at the structures to look at things that need attention and they keep a list of what needs to be done and every year they update that list and that helps sets out our maintenance program.”

Johns says on top of the inspections, they do insulator washings by spraying them with clean water from a helicopter.

He says using a chopper isn’t the only way they can do it, but it is the most efficient.

“Several benefits, it’s faster, another method of doing insulator washing  can be to use a five ton crane or bucket  trucks but to do that you need to get access on to people’s land or you have to operate from the edge of a road.  Using helicopters you eliminate all of that, we can do it a lot quicker using a helicopter.”

AltaLink has over 12-thousand kilometres of transmission lines and 280 sub-stations spread all over central and southern Alberta.

Johns is encouraging anyone who sees problems with lines to contact AltaLink immediately, their contact information can be found by clicking here.