ROANOKE – Appalachian Power is in the middle of a four-year rebuild of its downtown Roanoke underground network.
Sometimes, it’s almost become difficult to notice the now-common white Appalachian and contractor trucks parked generally at street corners working day-to-day on the $18.7 million project.
But recently, it was absolutely hard to miss the large assembly of trucks, cranes, workers and warning signs as one of a number of new replacement transformer vaults was put into place beneath 1st Street, between Luck Ave. and Franklin Rd.—in view of the company’s downtown office building.
According to Les Okes, company distribution system inspector, senior, and a major overseer of the rebuilding work, the vault shown in these photos is larger than the one it replaced and was moved away from the entrance of a nearby restaurant. That provided extra transformer and working space when needed but also added an extra bit of safety for pedestrians walking over the grates at the intersection and for patrons of the restaurant.
The civil contractor for the project is CCS, Inc. of North Carolina; the crane company on this job was Guy M. Turner, Inc. of Martinsville, Va.
The transformer vault came in two sections. The bottom section weighed 68,950 lbs.; the top was 63,185 lbs. Together, the inside dimensions of the finished vault is 20 ft. in length, 10 ft. wide, and 12 ft. high.—a sizable workspace that, at the end of the crane cable, almost resembles a “tiny home” popular on HGTV.
The precast vault was constructed by CP&P Concrete Pipe & Precast, LLC at its plant in nearby Salem, Va. Okes said that the completed unit conforms to all engineering requirements for underground utility structures.
Other work on the whole downtown project is being done by New River Electric and Appalachian crews.
The Roanoke downtown network serves 565 customers and is the largest of Appalachian’s four underground networks. It was built during the 1950s and comprises 272 manholes and 53 transformer vaults. The rebuild project will replace all butyl rubber insulated secondary wire, replace all aluminum secondary wire with copper (almost ten miles of copper), and reroute some high voltage cables for increased reliability, as well as other jobs.
The work began on the Roanoke underground system in 2014 and will be completed in 2018.