[amor de cosmos]

Northwest Transmission Line work intensifies
by Staff Writer - Terrace Standard
posted Dec 4, 2013 at 6:00 AM

THE company building BC Hydro's massive Northwest Transmission Line expects to have the wmajority of its towers complete by the end of the year leading to a planned completion date of late spring next year.

Speaking recently, Valard president Adam Budzinski described the project, which will run 344 kilometres from BC Hydro's Skeena Substation just south of Terrace to a new substation under construction at Bob Quinn alongside Bob Quinn on Hwy37 North, as one of the more challenging the Edmonton-based company has undertaken.

“It's not really one project, it's three or four,” said Budzinski of work going on simultaneously along the line's route.

Being installed for the 287 kilovolt line are 1,100 towers to carry 2,100 kilometres of conductor wire to both provide electricity to projects in the north and to feed power generated by hydro-electric projects into the provincial grid. Building access roads to tower locations has been challenging as has the need to establish camps along the route for workers, Budzinski said.



Valard has assembled a workforce of approximately 450 people for the project of which nearly 350 come from the northwest.

Latest available statistics put the aboriginal component at 165 workers, a key part of Valard's workplan.

“We've been going direct to the villages,” he said of Valard's aboriginal hiring program. And he said a project undertaken in Prince Rupert earlier gave the company a foothold in putting together its northwest work force.

Typically, newer hires begin work on crews putting in foundations for transmission towers.

If the work itself has been complex, so has the financial aspect of the transmission line.

From a projected cost of $404 million when announced in 2009, the price tag has been steadily rising to a new figure, released this spring, of $746 million.

BC Hydro said some of the added expense came in the form of building access roads into more challenging terrain than first thought and in adding project components not factored in when the budget was first set.

http://www.bclocalnews.com/news/234404211.html