PLSO The Oregon Surveyor July/August 2021

7 Professional Land Surveyors of Oregon | www.plso.org OrYSN Corner We got to use our training and skills as utility surveyors to have a direct impact on getting people’s electricity turned back on, which was very gratifying. OrYSN Corner Russell Dodge What a disaster! Surveying for PGE in an Unprecedented Year I have worked in the survey department at Portland General Electric (PGE) for three years. Typically, we stake poles and right of way. We do boundary sur- veys for existing properties or properties to be acquired. We’ll do ALTAs, and main- tain our generating facilities through monitoring surveys, topographic surveys, and as-builts. We work over a large part of the state— all the way fromBoardman to Downtown Portland, out to Grand Ronde, and all the electrical infrastructure in between. From pillars placed into bedrock, wemonitor our dams on the Clackamas and Deschutes riv- ers. We survey our concrete damswhen it’s hot and when it’s cold. These dams move and “breathe” as temperatures change. The surveys are required by FERC: the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. When we do our monitoring surveys, we use a half-second Total Station and turn three sets of angles at each monitoring point to chase thousandths across the dams. My least favorite topo at PGE was the day I RTK surveyed a coal ash pile in Boardman in Tyvek coveralls on an ATV. We use terrestrial LiDAR to collect data to support our engineers in everything from performing lightning strike vulnerability studies, to power line design purposes. Our disaster season “kicked off” in June 2020. OnMay 30, in the Madras area, a se- ries of rainstorms and a high wind event produced sustained winds of more than 90 miles per hour, torrential rain, and two-inch hail. Our Grizzly to Round Butte transmission line was affected, and we lost 10 towers to the storm. Our engineers wanted to know where the structural in- tegrity of the towers was lost, since they were designed and installed in the 1960s to withstand high winds. We did a little total station work, and a lot of scanning and aerial imagery. So much water came down that ditches on PGE roads were scoured out between 2.5 and 8 feet, and boulders were pushed down the road by water and wind. During the Labor Day fires, surveyors steppedasidewhilePGE activelymonitored This column is an adaptation of a presentation Russell gave at the March 15 Willamette Chapter meeting. I have adapted it to suit The Oregon Surveyor . – Leo A power flattened line after an ice storm. continues T