Submitted photo
Electric crews replace a damaged pole on a 69KV transmission line following a motor vehicle collision.
How did you start your day today?
If you’re like many people, you were abruptly awoken from slumber by an alarm – whether plugged into the wall or perhaps on your phone that is charging. You may have quietly crept out of the room and moved softly through your house, waiting to turn on a light so you can let the others sleep for a few more precious minutes. You turn the coffee maker or kettle on. If it’s the weekend you may turn on the stove and start some bacon and eggs, or perhaps just make some toast. You open the fridge where all your food is cool and the light illuminates as you open the door..
You get ready for the day using your electric toothbrush and finish your hair with a blow dryer. Before you leave, you turn the dishwasher on.
At work, you might sit in an air-conditioned workspace, using a computer, listening to the radio, working with power tools.
That evening, after putting a load of laundry in, you make some popcorn and relax in front of your tv.
Your whole day, our whole life, is powered by electricity.
We don’t really think much about it. We just expect our lights to turn on when we flip a switch and our phones to charge when we plug them in. But behind the outlet, electricity is flowing into your home, connected to the largest, most complex machine humans have ever built. And while we are connected to this vast machine, our City has a microcosm of it – our own grid.
If you were to stretch it all out end to end – over 2,500 km – Medicine Hat’s electricity conductors would run from here, across the prairies and Canadian shield to Toronto. Of the nearly 4,000 transformers that shift high voltage power to the usable voltages in our homes, the oil that fills and cools them is enough for 65,000 oil changes – every vehicle in Medicine Hat. It’s made up of 9,000 wood poles – a small forest. But a power system isn’t just a line of conductor or mass of metal, it’s like a net cast over our whole city, connecting us all in a grid.
This grid is filled with substations that break down the power to individual neighbourhood feeders which weave across the city connecting homes, businesses and industry. It’s filled with fuses and relays, breakers and meters. Poles and wires, cables and insulators. Every time we turn on an appliance, power is flowing through this vast system, causing elements to warm, motors to spin and lights to turn on.
This system wasn’t an accident. It was built and is maintained by dedicated electrical workers who know it inside and out. These men and women spend their careers maintaining, expanding and improving this grid that brings us the electricity we expect without thinking. They are there when a windstorm or fire severs those connections to restore power whether in a blizzard, the sweltering sun, or a midnight rain. They design and draft new plans, build new lines and continuously replace aging parts. They work in control rooms – monitoring the system, answering calls from thousands of customers or building maps to track the hundreds of thousands of individual parts.
Whether working 50 feet in the air to fix a broken pole, in a vault underground, or designing drawings for a new project, lineworkers ensure that we all continue to receive the power we need to live our daily lives. They are the true power behind our electricity.
Josh Reimer is the superintendent of field services, with the City of Medicine Hat’s utility distribution systems.
