Rathdrum Headquarters Update

This feature is about KEC's crews, the equipment they use to do their jobs and how our new headquarters is being designed to support their operations.

KEC has two types of line crews. The first of these is a “heavy crew” that is made up of a foreman, three journeyman linemen and an equipment operator. Each of these crews has a digger/derrick, a large bucket truck, a small bucket truck and a backhoe with a trailer. These crews are capable of tackling nearly any project the cooperative can throw at them. They are also very flexible. When working on large jobs, multiple crews can be assigned to a project. When working on smaller jobs, a heavy crew can be split into smaller crews. 

The second type of crew KEC operates is called a “make permanent” crew. These crews focus on converting temporary services used during home construction to the permanent service after construction is completed. Each of these crews is comprised of a lead lineman, a journeyman lineman and an equipment operator. They are equipped with a small bucket truck, a flatbed truck, a mini excavator and an equipment trailer. Learn more about their work on the back page in the Employee Spotlight article about Lead Lineman Chad Hall.

In addition to these crews, KEC also employs a few other journeyman linemen who are assigned to specialized work, such as system inspections, equipment repair and substation service. During outages or other emergency work, these linemen are integrated with our other crews to provide additional flexibility of operations. 

KEC currently employs six heavy crews and one make permanent crew. However, more crews are needed to keep up with our workload so KEC has hired five additional heavy crews from contractors. Of them, only one or two are used seasonally. The rest are contracted throughout the year.

Relying on a contract crew is more expensive than employing and equipping a KEC crew when needed year around. So, KEC will be hiring three additional heavy crews over the next three years. Why not hire those crews now? Consider this: the vehicles used for linework are very expensive. The equipment used by each heavy crew costs over $1 million. That equipment must also be ready for use at all times. If parked outdoors, crews must spend valuable time clearing snow off their vehicles during the winter months. During the summer months, the additional UV exposure increases the maintenance required on vehicles reducing their operational availability. For these reasons, digger/derricks and line trucks need to be stored indoors while backhoes and excavators, along with their trailers, need to be stored under awnings. Our current headquarters has 18 bays for indoor vehicle storage, and we have 29 vehicles that should be parked there! The three additional crews we will hire over the next three years will expand this to 40 vehicles. Until the new headquarters is built, several very important and expensive vehicles must be parked outdoors.

The photo below shows what that future indoor parking will look like. It’s a huge space. Once those three additional crews are hired, only two spaces will remain unfilled. The good news is additional bays can be added to this space in the future. This allows us to build what is needed in the next few years without risking overbuilding. 

KEC’s current electro technician space isn’t large enough to maintain some of the larger equipment we are installing on our system due to increased growth and capacity in our area. The new space is being designed with efficiency and safety in mind, allowing room for an overhead crane to lift large and heavy equipment, such as regulators, switchgear, pad mount transformers and reclosers. This equipment can be removed from its location in the field with a boom truck and moved into the shop with a forklift. From there the trolley crane can move the equipment vertically and horizontally so the electro technicians can safely perform internal inspections, repairs, or get equipment configuration and testing complete for a new project.

In addition, the new electro technician shop space will support KEC’s System Inspection and Maintenance program more efficiently as significantly more time is spent focused on inspecting specialty equipment and conducting condition assessments. This program helps ensure our cooperative’s infrastructure continues to be well-maintained and service reliability continues to be enhanced. 

A new hybrid space, called the engineering lab, will be included in the new headquarters. The lab will be adjacent to the electro technician offices and shop and will be used by the electro technicians and the electrical engineers. In this space, staff will conduct meter testing, configure and test reclosers and regulator controls. New and emerging technologies and KEC’s focus on integrating our new supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system means we must have the ability to properly configure and test new devices before they are installed on our system. 

The new headquarters will also provide more storage areas for meters, instrument transformers, and specialty equipment parts. Currently, these are stored in several places across KEC’s campus, including outdoor temporary storage containers. Equipment will be better organized with more space, providing a more efficient way to handle material, do testing and get it configured and ready for installation. 

You might be asking yourself: what is a war room? A war room is a large conference room or collaborative space focused on keeping the lights on and used for emergency response. In KEC’s case, this high technology space will be central to KEC’s engineering and operations department. Four TV screens in the war room will display real-time SCADA data 24/7. The other four screens can display KEC’s outage management system or be used for video conferencing. The war room is large enough to also be used for cross department meetings when not in use for emergency response. 

As mentioned in Scott’s employee spotlight on the previous page, KEC has been working on the installation and deployment of a new SCADA system. We don’t have a SCADA control center today and one of our goals with the new headquarters is to have a space for SCADA operators from which to control the system. The SCADA control center will also have a glass wall that can open up to the war room when involvement of other KEC staff is needed. 

When outages occur, our goal is always to restore power as quickly and safely as possible. As our substations and field devices communicate with the new headquarters, SCADA will provide the operators the status of feeder breakers and other devices. This means our SCADA operators will know what major devices operated during an outage so they can more quickly isolate problem areas, perform switching on the system, and restore power to as many members as possible until necessary repairs are made. The control center will also be used to remotely monitor our substations and equipment loading levels, voltages and power factor to increase system operating efficiencies.

Now we’d like to feature the maintenance facility, which will be a separate building from the administrative offices, warehouse and covered parking for KEC-owned vehicles. The maintenance facility will include separate bays for mechanics, welding and vehicle washing. 

As KEC has grown, so has our fleet and the need to maintain all of our vehicles. We keep and maintain our trucks and vehicles as long as possible. KEC has long outgrown our current maintenance facility and the new one is being designed with space and efficiency in mind. The new facility will have four drive-through bays (or eight total bays) for mechanics as well as a welding bay, which is six more bays than our current facility. These additional bays will allow KEC mechanics to work on more than one vehicle at a time, reducing the time vehicles are in for repairs so we can get them on the road faster. In addition, with our rapid growth, we anticipate the need for another mechanic in the near future.

The new space will also be large enough for a crane, which will allow our mechanics to safely do more vehicle maintenance and fabrication in-house. Conducting as much maintenance as possible in-house saves time and money. It allows us to do the work exactly how we need it done and this is a significant cost benefit to the cooperative. 

Winters in North Idaho are beautiful, but the snow and ice on the roads create maintenance challenges. To help, highway districts in our area spray de-icer on our roads. It’s effective at keeping the road ice-free, but is also extremely corrosive to metal and plastics. This is especially a problem on the undercarriage of vehicles, and leads to rust and damage to axles, wires, nuts, brake systems, ball joints and more. The best defense against rust from de-icer is routine undercarriage washing. That’s why a wash bay is going to be another important part of our new maintenance facility. Currently, we have a contractor come to our office on the weekends to wash our vehicles. This is an expensive service and not as effective as the undercarriage wash system we plan to have at our new maintenance facility. The system will wash the undercarriage of trucks and small equipment as they drive over it to help remove mud, de-icer and grime build-up (check out the photo below for an example of how it works). There will also be a wash wand on each side of the car wash so crews can spray off the vehicles when they finish their day. The goal is to keep our vehicles rust-free, which will decrease costs and maintenance, and increase the life of our vehicles. 

The materials storage areas include the warehouse and outdoor materials storage. As mentioned previously, space is a challenge at KEC’s current facility. We store materials in the warehouse, at our property across the street, in shipping containers and outside. The new facility will have a larger warehouse with taller ceilings to allow for more shelving that will be rated for more weight. The warehouse building will be attached to the main administrative building and is being constructed with future additions in mind.

The climate control in the warehouse will be improved as well. Currently, the bay doors are open in the morning and afternoon as the crews are loading and unloading their materials. The employees working in the warehouse wear coats, hats and gloves to stay warm in the winter. The new facility is being designed so the warehouse is separate from the enclosed vehicle parking bays and the pull through truck bays, which will help keep the elements out of the building. 

Currently, we store much of our materials in the yard around the warehouse and this area is not covered or paved. At the new facility the yard will be paved and most of the materials stored in the yard will be covered. When we receive new shipments, they will be staged, starting in storage outside and then moved into the warehouse. 

We will also have a covered loading dock for deliveries which will improve safety and efficiency. The covered dock will reduce the chance of employees and the forklift slipping on snow or ice. 

KEC’s current headquarters has a large concrete loading area where KEC crews park the trucks to be loaded with materials for the day. The current set up does not allow for loading on the side of trucks. The new facility will have pull through truck bays where trucks can pull in and a forklift can drive through and load materials on the sides, which will improve efficiency. This approach is less expensive to build than the large concrete loading area we have in our current facility.  

Lastly, KEC’s current power pole storage yard is located across Dakota Ave. In the new facility, the pole yard will be close to the warehouse and the drive through truck bays. Our goal is to extend the life of our equipment and materials and improve efficiency in the warehouse and covered storage area, which equates to quicker outage response times and reduces the cost of repair to benefit our members. 

Next, we’d like to feature the drive thru and lobby areas where we provide our members service. 

The member services area at our current headquarters has been remodeled a few times since it was constructed in the 1990s. While these remodels improved functionality for some time, the space limitations and our growth make the new headquarters a necessity. 

As we planned the new space, we made sure that things that work well today were incorporated into the new design. Some of those elements included a small meeting space for staff and members, a waiting area for visitors, and lobby facing workstations where staff can assist members. We also took the opportunity to make improvements including a larger reception desk to help two members at a time, better flow for foot traffic, enhanced safety and security features, and the addition of a drive-thru.  

The new drive thru will house a payment drop-box for after-hours payments as well as a drive-up window that will be staffed during regular business hours. At the window, members will be able to complete quick transactions like payments and paperwork drop-off/pick-up all from the comfort of their vehicle. This will be particularly convenient in times of harsh weather or for members with mobility challenges. 

As we live our mission of providing exceptional service, we are always looking for ways to meet our members where they are—whether they’d like to come into the office, call us, use our SmartHub app or soon use the drive thru. This is just another way we are looking out for you, our members.

Now, we’d like to feature the new training facility at our headquarters. The growth in our area has increased our workload and that means we need more lineworkers. It can be a challenge to find qualified lineworkers and there are few training opportunities for this trade in the Northwest. During the design process of our new headquarters, we began considering the development of an indoor training facility and began collaborating with the North Idaho College Workforce Training Center, NW Line Joint Apprenticeship and Training Committee, and neighboring cooperatives, municipal and public utilities. 

The KEC training facility emerged as a best practice from those discussions and will allow us to train our apprentices right here in our community, with both an indoor and outdoor training area. The indoor portion will be about 8,000 square feet and 43 feet tall, which provides the necessary space for our line workers to set power poles inside and to pull bucket trucks into the facility to work next to the poles. The design allows for flexibility and updates so our lineworkers can test new and emerging technologies in a controlled environment rather than putting it in the field first, which improves reliability for our members. A huge benefit of the indoor training facility is that it allows apprentices and lineworkers to train safely regardless of weather, season changes and or daylight to better prepare for work in less favorable conditions.