An article published on this website on Friday (9/30) alerted residents to installation of new utility poles and transformers.  The article promised an update on why this is taking place.

Photo shows new transformer being hoisted to a pole on Hayes Drive.

The work could be mean greater electrical reliability during weather events. Among outages during summer 2021, some lost power for four days.  This summer, some Clark Lakers had no service for a whopping 50 hours.  Considering Clark Lake’s outages over the last couple years, this is good news.

So, what improvement are being made?  Installation of automatic transfer reclosers (ATRs).  If this sounds like TMI, here’s the Readers Digest version.  The technology should reduce outages or make them shorter.  Consumers Josh Martin says “it helps customers who may have seen outages to go on for hours to being without power for only minutes or even seconds.”

The ATR process works like this.  If a tree takes out a line, the ATRs “are programmed to detect power loss and follow predetermined actions to help reroute power in another direction.”  When damage occurs power is cutoff for wide areas for safety reasons.  The ATRs reduce the cutoff area closer to where the problem occurred.

If you’d like a deeper dive into the process, please click here.  Included is a video.

Consumers installed an underground cable from Jefferson Road to where meets up with a pole midpoint on Hayes Drive.

That electrical cable installation is completely separate from another project conducted by Frontier.  Frontier is installing fiber internet service in Columbia Township, including a small area of Clark Lake.  To learn about the Frontier installation, please click here. 

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