For the future ... and getting the cows milked this morning

IN THE WEE HOURS SATURDAY MORNING, crews from Central Maine Power Company were hard at work swapping out old lines for new at the Locke Mills substation. The new, higher-voltage lines went up in anticipation of future growth and demand in the area, Line Supervisor Dennis Marquis said. Statewide, the voltages in CMP’s lines vary greatly, Marquis said, from a low of 2,400 in some distribution lines, to a high of 345,000 in major transmission lines. In the case of the Locke Mill substation, the on-site transformer currently steps 34,000 volts down to 12,000, but, he said, CMP wants to be ready to increase that when the need warrants. In the upper photo workers in prepare “terminators” (“basically, an electrical plug,” Marguis said) for the new lines. To accommodate the upgrade, electricity went out at 12:30 a.m. Saturday for nearly 1,000 customers fed through the substation. The work plan called for it to be out until 5 a.m.  But when notice of the outage was published, Marquis said, “I had a farmer call me from somewhere up on the East Bethel Road, and he said: ‘Could you move that up an hour? I have cows to milk at 4:30.’ And we kept that in mind.” Power went back on at 4 a.m.