Highway 85 Road Expansion:
How is MEC involved?
If you’ve travelled north on Highway 85 from Grassy Butte, you may have noticed a large road construction project underway as you cross the Little Missouri River. The Highway 85 road expansion officially broke ground in late 2022, but the planning for this project began well in advance. Adding two more lanes and altering the existing highway requires cooperation from many different parties such as designers, construction crews, utility providers, and landowners. To help keep construction of this scale on schedule, McKenzie Electric’s staff works to make sure their piece of the puzzle is completed well in advance to avoid any conflicts.
The relocation of electrical infrastructure may not be the first thing you think of when you see bulldozers, tractor-scrapers, and pay loaders preparing the earth for a road project. At an electric cooperative, it’s the engineering department’s bread and butter! Starting with the design process, McKenzie Electric’s staff create the gameplan for the placement of new structures that will replace the retired, or removed, lines that are in the way of construction. From there, right of way (ROW) specialists examine the current easements, and if necessary, draft new proposals for landowners who will be impacted by the move. Karl Aaker, McKenzie Electric’s Engineering Director, equates these easement adjustments to when electricity was first wired to the farms and ranches of our area. “Landowners today are still doing their part to ensure continued electric service is provided to current and future members of the cooperative. Much like how our grandparents and great-grandparents provided the way to route electricity though their land.”
For a road project of this size, ROW and DOT guidelines require distribution poles to be placed no less than 165 feet from centerline. Since two more lanes are being added, McKenzie Electric worked with landowners to secure the movement of the poles if they were within the anticipated road construction route. The design of the distribution network change was drafted and completed in 2022. Starting with the construction conflicts, or interference of line and poles, McKenzie Electric was able to complete the total list of distribution conflicts by July 2023. A task that simply could not have been done without the help of our trusted members and landowners.
Alongside pole moves, certain areas within the project required the relocation of underground lines to ensure accidents and loss of power don’t occur.
“In many cases, McKenzie Electric was able to reroute power to different feed points, so our members wouldn’t experience an outage” explains Zane Frick, Operations Director. “McKenzie Electric is always striving to improve the reliability of our system and one way that we do that is through the construction of tie lines so that meters can be served from different sources. This benefited our members during this project because even if we had to relocate the line that served as the primary feed, we were able to backfeed services from an alternative source, ensuring that our members did not experience prolonged outages.”
Once the agreements with landowners are in place, construction of the new lines began. With the unique nature of road movements and the relocation of cooperative infrastructure, the new poles were placed prior to the old system being retired. Doing so keeps power flowing to the homes and businesses served by those lines until the decision to is made to switch to the new structures. This way, McKenzie Electric avoids construction related outages that may impact our members.
The section currently in construction begins just south of Watford City and stretches to the Long X Bridge that crosses the Little Missouri River. To date, McKenzie Electric has retired 8.83 miles of line and rebuilt 9.31 miles to accommodate the road move. With the next phase of the project taking place from the Long X Bridge to Highway 200 near Grassy Butte, many more poles and line will be moved. At project completion, it is estimated that a total of 25 miles will be rebuilt along with the conversion of all overhead road crossings, aside from transmission lines, to underground due to the width of the road.
The next time you see a large road project in progress, keep your electric utility in mind! Without the behind-the-scenes planning of the utility’s engineers, you may see those bright orange cones longer than expected during the road construction season.