Finding trouble before it finds us, by Eric Eriksen
A few years back my doctor started asking me to come in once a year 
instead of occasionally. Nothing was wrong — that was the point. It’s a lot easier to fix a small thing early than a big thing late.
Our power lines are no different. For most of our history, they got a checkup about once every five years.
That’s how it’s always been done out here. Our crews drive 2,800 miles of line and lay eyes on more than 42,000 poles, from Creede to Crestone and Ox Cart to San Luis. It’s honest, careful work, and they’re good at it. But five years is a long time in the country where the wind blows, the cottonwoods grow, and wildfire season keeps getting longer.
So, a group of our own employees asked a simple question: is there a faster way that saves money and improves reliability?
They tried drones. Drones are impressive, but the best programs cover about 10 miles a day — at that pace we’d never catch up. They looked at satellite pictures. Interesting to look at, but you can’t spot a cracked crossarm from space.
Then we found Fast Forward.
A vehicle, a camera, a lot of pictures
Fast Forward mounts cameras on a vehicle and drives our lines along the same roads our crews do. The cameras take wide-angle and heat-sensing pictures of every pole they pass.
A computer with AI soft-ware sorts through about three million images and flags the ones that need a closer look — a leaning pole, a connection running hot, a piece of hardware starting to give out.
One vehicle can cover about 300 miles a day. Work that used to take five years now takes days — without adding trucks, crews or overtime to the cost of serving you.
I want to be clear about what those cameras are for. They point at our poles and wires, not at homes or people. We use the pictures to find equipment problems, and that’s it.
What it’s already found
On one of the first patrols, the imagery picked up a pair of shoes hanging over our lines near Crestone (see photo below)— a real hazard. Our crews had them down before they caused an outage.
It also shows us where trees and brush are crowding the lines, so our right-of-way crews can trim where it matters instead of guessing.
Why it matters to you
Better data gathered faster, means better decisions — and that shows up in two places you care about.
Reliability. A connection running hot today is an outage waiting to happen. Finding it now means your lights stay on, and it means our crews fix it on a Tuesday morning instead of at two in the morning in a blizzard.
Cost. Replacing a pole on our schedule costs far less than replacing one after it fails, and every hour our crews aren’t chasing an unknown outage is an hour spent making the system stronger. In a cooperative, those savings don’t disappear — they come back to you as steadier rates.
And on wildfire and vegetation management, we’d rather act on evidence than hunches. Knowing which spans need attention puts our wildfire dollars where the risk is. That’s the whole job.
I’m proud of the crew that chased this down. They didn’t wait for someone to tell them the old way wasn’t good enough — they went and found a better one.
Thank you for your continued trust. Feel free to stop in to say “hi,” write EEriksen@slvrec.com, or call anytime at 719-852-6630. I look forward to your feedback, concerns and bright ideas.
