Power outages are
hardly a rare phenomenon in Duneland but evidently folks who live in the
Morningside subdivision--on that odd peninsula of Chesterton that juts into
Porter north of I-94, east of Waverly Road, and south of East Oakhill
Road--find themselves in the dark pretty darn often.
Some of them think
so, at any rate, and have made their concerns known to NIPSCO. NIPSCO, for
its part, is blaming the trees but also promising an imminent improvement in
reliability.
At the Chesterton
Town Council’s meeting Monday night, Town Manager Bernie Doyle shared an
e-mail received earlier in the day from NIPSCO’s manager of public affairs,
Rick Calinski, who appears to acknowledge that the Morningside folks may
have a point.
The e-mail:
“NIPSCO has had
some outreach from a few residents at Morningside subdivision in Chesterton
regarding frequent power outages.
“We are starting
some major tree trimming along the circuits that feed this area along with
installing some new equipment that should also support dependability in this
area. This should really help create a more reliable circuit in this area.
“I just wanted to
make the town aware of this as you may have heard from a few residents as
well.”
Doyle expressed his
gratitude to Calinski for staying on top of the problem.
The Power Failure
at the Treatment Plant
While on the
subject of blackouts, Utility Superintendent Dave Ryan told the council
that, as far as anyone can tell, it was a lightning strike that damaged the
battery charger on the wastewater treatment plant’s backup generator.
The generator’s
subsequent failure during a power outage on the night of July 24 led to the
outflow of approximately 127,000 gallons of untreated wastewater into the
Little Calumet River. It wasn’t a bypass, strictly speaking, nor a combined
sewer overflow--both of which occur when a treatment plant’s capacity is
overwhelmed by the sheer volume of wastewater--but rather a “dead-stick”
incident in which the plant just stopped working as a system.
As it happens, 11
of the 20 rechargeable nickel-cadmium batteries which were supposed to power
the generator were later found to be dead and incapable of taking of a new
charge, Ryan told the Chesterton Tribune after the meeting.
Ryan has
accordingly junked all 20 NiCads and replaced them with a double bank of two
heavy-duty wet-cell batteries each, the first bank tasked to running the
generator as needed, the second bank to backing up the first.
Ryan noted that the
blackout also made it impossible for the plant’s remote monitoring and
control system--its SCADA--to notify personnel, because a computer is like
any other device: it won’t work without juice. “We didn’t get a SCADA
warning because there was no power,” he said.
The Art Fair
Meanwhile, Park
Superintendent Bruce Mathias reported that the 58th annual Chesterton Art
Fair, held this past Saturday and Sunday at Dogwood Park, “went absolutely
wonderful.”
“I had not a single
complaint,” Mathias told the council. “It went as smoothly as it could
possibly go.”
“It was a good
move,” noted Member Jim Ton, R-1st, to bring the Chesterton Art Fair back to
Chesterton, after so many years being hosted by Hawthorne Park. “And you
facilitated the move very well,” he told Mathias.
Good Job,
Schnadenberg
Member Lloyd “Buck”
Kittredge took a moment at the end of the meeting to thank Street
Commissioner John Schnadenberg for fixing a small “divot” left in the
roadway following the Norfolk Southern’s repair of the at-grade crossing on
South Calumet Road.
Schnadenberg
responded quickly after being alerted and improvised creatively, by securing
some spare material and using it to fill the divot, Kittredge said.