Unplug 'em

So I'm building a little neighborhood in a development at the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. It's a new development and so there's construction happening on adjacent parcels and for the most part we all get along pretty well. But a few weeks ago I discovered that one of my neighbors had tapped into one of my transformers to run power to their jobsite. I discovered this on the morning we hooked up our second of four buildings to the transformer and the transformer exploded.

Now this transformer is not some trash-can type unit that's mounted on a telephone pole. It's installed at the end of our secondary power line, and is a decent size unit (37.5 kva). It's not cheap either. So when it blew up, it was kind of a big friggin deal.

The power company (PSE) came out almost instantaneously and replaced it with another transformer that had double the capacity (75 kva). I had to scratch my head. Then I had to call my Construction Manager - why did PSE have to double the capacity of our transformer? Well, it appears that our neighbors down the hill have their temporary power hooked up to it. What?! How come they're plugged into my transformer? I dunno - he says - but let me ask around.

Now, my neighbors down the hill have two tower cranes and at least a dozen trailers on their site. It is not a small operation. And I had to wonder, how come they didn't get their own damn power off their own secondary line like we had to?

Well, apparently, there was a little bit of good-'ol-boy cowboy-style construction going on when they started up. Somebody from their site asked somebody from our site if they could tie into that there transformer. And since our construction hadn't made it so far as to use that transformer yet, and since our transformer was a lot closer than the main road with the primary, it turned out to be a cheap and easy solution for them to run a few lines to our transformer. So based on a nod and a grin, they ran a 6" conduit about 200' overland and up the outside of a 75' high retaining wall and set a pole with a meter in what is now the backyard of a home I'm trying to sell.

And no, they never asked me. And no, I didn't give them permission to run that line across our property, to install a meter or to plug into my damn transformer. Because the transformer is sized to handle just our four buildings and not our four buildings plus the construction trailer park down the hill. And yes, the guy from my site who gave that little nod is no longer working for our company. In fact he left last fall just before we completely changed the field staff (let's just say he saw the writing on the wall).

So, when that transformer blew I started asking questions. First I looked into the transformer capacity. Even with the new 75 kva transformer, there's only enough connections to plug in my four buildings. No room for anything else, even if there is line capacity in the equipment.

Then I looked into easements, since my neighbor seems to think that PSE's easement allows them to put their power lines and power meter in my backyard. Turns out that my neighbors never asked PSE if they could run their lines to our transformer. They just assumed they could run their power lines and they'd be covered. They assumed wrong. The easement only counts if PSE installs the lines. Which means that my neighbor committed (according to PSE) an "illegal tresspass" on my property. And do you know, this is the first time in my life that the blanket easements granted to utilities have actually worked in my favor. It means I can unplug my neighbor.

The transformer blew up three weeks ago and when it did I formally notified my neighbor that I wanted them to remove their temp power from my property. You'd think they'd have done something, come up with some backup plan or tried to get another line from the transformer they'd just installed on their own property. I know that if it were me, I'd be working my butt off to secure another source of power on the off chance that chick up the hill did unplug me.

I've been on the phone with PSE every other day trying to get them to figure out another way to supply power to my neighbor. Today I even went down to their office and talked to their engineers in person. And you know - I'm starting to think that I'm the only one who's really pushing to get my neighbor's power from somewhere else. I'm getting the sense that these guys are not taking me at my word.

I told them that when I drop meters on that last building I will unplug them to connect my last building. My meter order is called in. They'll show up sometime in the next seven days. And when they do, I'm gonna unplug 'em.


UPDATE:
So I wrote that post last Wednesday. On Friday the boys down the hill finally came up to take a look at where they were getting their power from. They brought along a couple of engineers from PSE to see if there was any way they could jerry-rig it so they could stay plugged in. They cracked it open, took a gander at the guts and PSE said No-Can-Do. And That's when the boys started to take the matter seriously.

Today is Tuesday the 13th and this morning we unplugged 'em.