First new paving — next, power grid hardening coming to Tucker Hill Road

Residents on the east portion of Tucker Hill Road were surprised by the unannounced appearance of BlakTop road paving company earlier this month. They had resigned themselves to the idea that there would be no repaving in 2026 because the Town did not receive State funding. However, doing nothing for yet another year did not sit well with Town Manager Brian Story. He decided that the Town paving fund was sufficiently robust to afford the $120,000 or so to re-pave a stretch from Rt 113 to Whippoorwill Road. And the weather gods smiled at this and gave the warm sunny conditions needed for adhering fresh asphalt.

The Town will re-apply for state assistance for more paving in 2027. In the meantime, Tucker Hill Rd residents may look forward to another imminent source of traffic disruption. On Monday October 19th representatives from Green Mountain Power (GMP) asked permission to "rebuild in place" the section of electrical lines from Rt 113 to the Army Corps of Engineers major trail to the Union Village Dam. 

This is part of GMP's initiative to "storm harden" Vermont's electrical grid, starting with the power lines suffering the poorest performance — that is, the most power outages — in the face of wind, ice, and snow storms. The state is allowing GMP to add four more years to their ongoing study documenting the worst-performing and well-performing circuits throughout the grid. So far, 100 miles of overhead lines have been storm-hardened and another 100 miles have been placed underground across 15 towns in Vermont, improving electrical resiliency for 17,400 customers. While this work is costly up front, its goal is to reduce the rising expense of repeated storm restoration work, something that will only get worse with climate change. Over the last ten years, this has cost over $225 million and most of this ultimately gets passed on to GMP customers. That's because GMP is  regulated by the VT Public Utility Commission (PUC) through GMP's Multi-Year Regulatory Plan. While the Plan does put a baseline amount covering storm damage into GMP's standard rates, it also allows GMP to collect revenue directly from customers for catastrophic storm damages.

So far, storm hardening has allowed GMP to avoid around $700,000 in restoration costs and about 80,000 customer outage hours.

While the Department of Public Service (DPS) agrees in principle with increased grid resilience, it balked at GMP's first proposal to dedicate up to $341 million over four years to this initiative. Subsequently the PUC approved only one-third of the amount — about $113 million — for improving resilience, citing affordability concerns for residents as "central to their analysis."

So, as was explained on Monday, GMP will not be subcontracting any of the work on the Tucker Hill power lines. They will stick to using the GMP workforce allocated to this part of the state. Thus the work will proceed in a "start-stop" fashion, as those same workers will get called away periodically when they are needed on other projects. It was estimated that the entire two miles will take anything from 6 to 12 months, and that the crew will work through the winter. 

Grid hardening on Tucker Hill Rd will consist of moving many of the electrical lines to new poles that are 40-50 ft tall. The very top line will be a hardened steel cable that is designed to deflect the strikes of falling trees. Some existing poles will be stabilized with new guy wires. Old transmission lines will also be replaced with highly durable power lines. While the preferred method is to put power lines underground, as was done on Academy Road, this is not possible on many paved roads, including Tucker Hill Rd, because the power lines repeatedly cross from one side of the road to the other. 

GMP will work in cooperation with ECFiber, whose fiber-optic trunk line also runs on the utility poles on Tucker Hill Rd. For a while there will be double utility poles in many places to allow ECFiber the leeway they need to transfer their fiber optic cable to the new poles. 

The other complication, of course, will be more repaving work, since it is reasonably likely that the Town will be granted the state road assistance that was promised for 2026 but did not materialize. Somehow BlakTop and GMP will find a way to work around each other if needed. GMP informed the selectboard that their machines have rubber treads and rubber outrigger pads that hopefully will not leave huge dents in newly laid asphalt!  They also promised to give a two-week warning before commencing work.