By Neil Farrell
The boom operator sits in the doorway, legs sticking out, feet resting on the step of the helicopter, a 30-foot long boom pointing towards high power electrical wires blasting them with a 950 psi jet of water coming out a nozzle that’s only a ¼-inch in diameter.
For a veteran reporter on his virgin helicopter flight, the scene is wondrous.
Of course with the doors removed from the Sacramento Executive Helicopters, Inc.’s whirly-bird, the flight to the job site over the backcountry of Arroyo Grande and Grover Beach was terrifying.
With nothing to hang onto (no straps or bars, I mean nothing), one attains a newfound respect for the common seatbelt, as that’s the only thing keeping you from falling out with even a slight banking.
“Never should have signed that release of liability,” I say to myself.
“What’s that Neil?” asks our pilot, Luke, who is from Modesto (yeah, Mo-town!). I forget that one has to watch what they say in a helicopter, because everyone has a microphone and headset.
Wonder if they can hear my heart thumping through my chest? I 
think, as I look out the door straight down at the ground below trying to take photos without getting dizzy.
Pacific Gas & Electric’s continuous chore of washing the insulators of the power grid’s high voltage wires — from the 500,000 Watt lines to the 230K, 115K and down to 70K — has come to the Central Coast again.
The crew will be washing the lines between Atascadero and Morro Bay on Aug. 20 and 21, said Roland Burks, PG&E’s sub-foreman for the program. “We do this type of work year-round, throughout PG&E’s service area,” he told a small group of TV, and print reporters gathered for a helo flight to cover the story.
They can clean about 150 towers a day and cover 20 miles of lines with the helicopter, which is a fairly recent method of doing this work. Previously, they had to send workmen in crane trucks to each tower, and some of them are in pretty remote areas.
They clean 17,000 electrical towers a year, from Northern Santa Barbara County (Buellton, really) to Humboldt, from the Sierras to the sea, Burks explained.
The helicopter that does the washing has been stripped inside to accommodate a 110-gallon water tank.
While that may not seem like much water, Burks said water weighs about 8-pounds a gallon, so 110 gallons is nearly a thousand pounds, and with a helicopter, weight is a very big factor in safety. (Is that why they asked my weight before the flight? About 30 gallons of water, in case you wondered.)
And it’s cheaper, too. With the helicopters, Burk said they could clean a tower for about $140 — far less than it would cost to send a work crew out.
Over the course of a year, and especially in the absence of very much rain, the insulators pick up dust and sea salt, which the fog turns into a slurry that can lead to power outages. The birds do a number on the insulators too.
The slightest shift in the electrical current and the system could trip and shut down, so insulation is a big factor in keeping a smooth current flow and avoiding blackouts.
“The way rain works,” Burks said, “is if we get 2-inches of rain in a 48-hour period there’s no need to wash them. We haven’t seen that in 10 years. This is the dirtiest they’ve been in a long time.”
And with the drought, there’s the added concern of water use. PG&E Spokesman Blair Jones said all the water they are using in SLO County is coming from Diablo Canyon Power Plant’s desal plant and being trucked to the landing zone in 5,000-gallon tanker trucks.
On this day the landing zone was on top of a barren hill and there’s a fuel tanker truck there along with two water trucks.
The washing crew is a pilot and a boom operator, the guy hanging outside the bird, directing and controlling the spray. It hovers above the tower seemingly too close for comfort.
After about 250 photos and a 25-minute flight, it’s time to head back. We rise up and turn back to the PG&E Pismo Beach maintenance yard. I start to check the seatbelt, but yank my hand away before I accidentally release the lock.
