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.
