Minimizing Utility Pole Damage Caused by Birds
Image courtesy of Ian Sane under Attribution 2.0 Generic License, resized to 700 x 391 pixels.
Utility pole damage can take many different forms – fire, wind, termites, and even human pranksters. But birds may be the most annoying, as evidenced by the fact that woodpeckers recently caused a huge amount of utility pole damage for a small municipal electric utility in Washington state.
The utility company, Snohomish County PUD, has been forced to replace 18 poles this year that were damaged by woodpeckers and insects, at a price tag of $1.5 million.
Tactics for Preventing or Minimizing Utility Pole Damage
Obviously, decayed power poles can fall and cause outages, so replacing the compromised ones makes sense from a reliability perspective. However, this begs the question – what can be done to prevent this?
Well, one thing that can be done is to install bird perching and/or nesting deterrents on transmission towers. These include visual and physical devices such as nets, wire barriers, and rotating shiny wheels. Another method is to wrap poles in a steel mesh or a polymeric fabric. Wooden poles could also be replaced with steel, concrete, or even composite fiberglass poles, but this would obviously come at a tremendous cost.
If prevention is not in the cards, there are some things that can be done to mitigate damage after the fact. One tactic is to fill holes with a special compound to prevent exposure to the elements. However, this is more of a temporary fix to defer the replacement as opposed to a permanent solution.
As you can imagine, each potential solution has both pros and cons, and the location of each pole is a factor as various solutions may be more or less attractive or feasible based on the characteristics of the pole and the environment.
In the final analysis, the optimal mitigation tactic – whether preventive or reactive – in each case will depend on criticality of line and ease of access to the site for installation crews. There’s little doubt that minimizing utility pole damage requires data and analysis. Good luck!
