View from above
Engineer uses drones to make work safer
WINCHESTER
What cemented Isaac Blanford’s belief in using drones to make the work he and line crews do at East Kentucky Power Cooperative safer was an electric transmission line that kept experiencing momentary outages.
“We couldn’t find the problem, and we had looked multiple times,” Blanford says. The line had been a multiday mystery. Crews searched for an issue from the ground, and a helicopter searched from above. Dozens of hours of searching turned up nothing.
Then Blanford sent out one of EKPC’s drones.
“It only took us 20 minutes to find the problem,” he says. A flashed insulator was the culprit, and as it turned out, the helicopter couldn’t get the right angle to see it, and neither could the ground crew. Without the drone, the problem might not have been found.
“I am always amazed at how quickly we can find the problems using the drone,” Blanford says.
A senior engineer in EKPC’s Reliability group, Blanford first used drones when he was in college. In 2015, he retrofitted a drone with a methane gas detector to cover a lot of ground more quickly than he could on foot. The rig worked. His passion for using technology to make working in the field safer and more efficient grew from there.
Blanford’s supervisor, Steve Anderson, says the drone program has been a game changer in some instances: “During both routine and outage conditions, the drone technology allows EKPC personnel the ability to perform more efficient, detailed and focused inspections than the more traditional inspection methods.”
In 2018, Blanford helped start EKPC’s drone program with a single drone. He eventually wrote the drone policy for EKPC and began to train fellow employees in drone certification. He helped them get their remote pilot certificate required by the Federal Aviation Administration.
The first drone was EKPC’s only one for two years, but the co-op has added more drones and operators. “We now have 10 drones and 14 operators,” Blanford says. “The technology definitely helps.”
Blanford sees the drone program as a potential employee recruiting tool and an important tool for repairing lines, troubleshooting and rights of way. “If we have trouble calls, we can fly the line and sometimes very quickly diagnose the issue,” he says. “I think people want to work in a place where they can use fun technology to help them do their work.”
LANNY BRANNOCK is communications manager at East Kentucky Power Cooperative.
