Powering the Super Bowl

Preventing black outs

06:39 PM CST on Monday, January 12, 2004

By Mike Zientek / 11 News

Click to watch video

Centerpoint crews are working hard now, hoping to prevent any outages during Super Bowl week.

The lunch hour rush at a downtown restaurant isn't much, compared to the kind of crowds they expect just before the Super Bowl.

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The last thing they'll want then, back in the kitchens, is the power going off. "On a day like that," said Daniel Lee, with St. Pete's Dancing Marlin, "I don't know what we would do."

Brandt Gonzales and other Centerpoint Energy technicians don't want restaurant owners to worry.

So for four months, in high usuage areas like downtown, Reliant Park and the airports, they've been taking rides in cherry-pickers up to overhead power lines, so they can make an up-close inspection of the lines themselves.

And, they don't just eyeball it themselves. Gonzales uses an infrared camera with an electric eye. He aims it as the most likely spots to go bad -- on the connections. "The camera can see what a human cannot," he says. "Heat shows itself in bright, white spots visible through the lens."

Technicians say when the camera sees heat, that means there's resistance in the line. If that line's not fixed, it can burn up. "We've caught temperatures in excess of 1200 degrees," he says. "Those are not good temperatures. We consider that an urgent matter."

Working with sense of urgency now, he tells us, can prevent a disaster later.

"When we have no outages, we know we've done our job."