BY CRAIG FREILICH
North Country This Week

The New York Power Authority and its contractors have begun pre-positioning equipment and materials in Louisville, Potsdam and Canton to begin rebuilding electric transmission lines this spring between Massena and Croghan.

There are two staging areas in Louisville, one for the authority itself near Louisville Road at 14192 NY-37, and one for contractor Michels Corporation’s power division at Patterson Road, off of State Rt. 37 near the Louisville Town Hall.

Michels has a second yard at Route 11 and Remington Avenue in Canton, at the south end of the village.

In Potsdam, subcontractor Northern Clearing has a staging area at 12-64 Madrid Avenue on land reportedly leased from trucking company LTI next door.

Northern Clearing of Ashland, Wisc., will be “preparing access roads for work to start next month when we get delivery of the poles,” new metal structures to replace the 78-year-old wooden poles for the Massena to Croghan stretch of the current Moses-Adirondack 1 and 2 transmission lines that run from St. Lawrence County to Lewis County, according to Maura Balaban, NYPA’s spokeswoman for the “Smart Path” power transmission upgrades planned for the state.

When completed, the new lines will run north to south through St. Lawrence and Lewis counties from the Moses-Saunders Power Dam in Massena, also known as NYPA's St. Lawrence-FDR hydroelectric plant, to a substation in Croghan, in order to send electricity to high-demand areas downstate. The project also includes upgrades to the Moses Power Dam Switchyard.

Northern Clearing will also be handling the right-of-way needs of the project, which will run in the path of the original line to limit disruption to adjacent property.

Michels Corporation of Brownsville, Wisc. and its power division will be handling most of the work. Their expertise is in electrical power infrastructure construction.

In Potsdam, Village Code Enforcement Officer Lisa Newby said neither NYPA, Michels nor Northern Clearing have applied for a building permit so they have not paid a building permit fee. "It looks like they're doing site improvement so far," so no building permit is required to this point. And if all they're doing is prepositioning supplies for the NYPA project, even though the site is buzzing with activity from a steady stream of tractor-trailers and machines unloading materials for placement around the yard, no permit will be required, Newby said.

The entire project is expected to cost in the neighborhood of a half-billion dollars.

The first phase, to begin this spring, will involve new poles and lines from Massena to the south. The rebuilt lines will be taller but stronger, less susceptible to failure and able to better withstand inclement weather, such as ice storms, according to announcements from NYPA and the governor’s office.

The second phase will see the rebuilding of eight miles of existing steel structures coming out of the Robert-Moses Switchyard in the Town of Massena and rebuilding about half a mile of steel structures into the Adirondack substation with steel monopoles, and constructing a new 345 kV switchyard at the Robert Moses switchyard and the Adirondack substation.

In its entirety, the Smart Path Reliability Project traverses through 12 towns, from north to south, Massena, Louisville, Norfolk, Madrid, Potsdam, Canton, Russell, Hermon, Edwards and Pitcairn in St. Lawrence County, and Diana and Croghan in Lewis County.