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Six bucket trucks arrive on huge cargo plane
A large cargo plane carrying bucket trucks from the U.S. mainland arrived yesterday afternoon at the Francisco C. Ada/Saipan International Airport.
Acting Commonwealth Utilities Corp. executive director John Riegel said the linemen who will be operating these trucks arrived on Saturday from Colorado. The crew and CUC and government officials assisting with restoration efforts after Typhoon Soudelor were at the airport yesterday to await the Antonov AH 124 and its trucks.
Six bucket trucks arrived on the Antonov 124 yesterday afternoon to aid power restoration efforts following Typhoon Soudelor. (Dennis B. Chan)
Riegel said this crew from Colorado—brought in by the Federal Emergency Management Agency—will be putting up transformers, hooking up homes, and taking care of dropped lines, for example.
“We worked with FEMA to get them here. But the CNMI is footing the bill for their presence,” Riegel said in an interview outside the airport gates after the trucks had been unloaded.
The crew would be on island for about two months.
Riegel said yesterday that about 40 percent of CUC customers already have power but this was a “rough number.”
As for more shipment of equipment, Riegel said another shipment of transformers and power poles are expected.
“We have the normal hardware coming in,” he said. “But as far as big shipment of equipment and materials, we are reaching the end of the big shipments.”
CUC public information officer Brad Ruszala said the next shipment of transformers would be on island in about a week and a half, on Oct. 28.
This is a shipment of 306 transformers, he said.
“They were originally scheduled for the 20th, but they are on the 28th so we can get it all on one flight,” Ruszala told Saipan Tribune.
“It was going to be broken up into two… But we’d rather wait and get it all at once,” added Riegel yesterday.
