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| 8/21/2006 4:09:00 PM | Email this article • Print this article | |
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A milion feet of red ribbon for ATC
Matt Geiger
News Editor
Shaun Bollig has an offer for the American Transmission Company (ATC) - he wants to donate one million feet of his product if the company will opt to bury a new 345-kilovolt transmission line in Dane County.
"My conscience no longer allows me to stay silent," he states in a letter to the editor in this week's Middleton Times-Tribune. In the letter, Bollig challenges ATC to bury the new line rather than erect a set of 120-foot metal poles to carry it across the rural landscape.
Those poles, even according to ATC spokesperson Charles Gonzalez at a recent public hearing, "aren't going to win any beauty contests."
In Stock Now, Inc., the company Bollig founded 16 years ago, sells the red plastic warning ribbon utility companies bury three feet above underground electrical transmission lines. The ribbon is designed to warn any wayward diggers to stop or risk a serious hazard.
"I'm one of those people who should have spoken up months ago," he added in a Monday interview. "I want to help ATC do the right thing."
The proposed transmission line will connect a power substation in Rockdale with one in west Middleton, and ATC held a series of open houses over the summer while trying to determine which route to use. Instead of burying the line, ATC representatives have instead pitched plans for 120-foot metal poles to carry it, saying the latter method is more cost effective.
Bollig says in order to keep anyone from claiming his stance on the issue is part of a plan for financial gain, he will donate one million feet of warning tape to ATC if the transmission company decides to bury the line. One million feet is 189.4 miles, more than enough to cover the proposed 55-mile line.
"I'll give it to them and if they don't ever do business with me again, I don't care," he said.
"In Wisconsin, where we have a large tourism-based industry, I can't understand why anyone would want to spoil the pristine wilderness," Bollig continued. "I think the ATC is doing it that way because that is the way they have always done it. I think they are just used to not burying them."
That is not the case with utility companies elsewhere, Bollig claims.
Bollig says just last week, a Colorado company called him to order 600,000 feet of warning tape, and he fails to see why ATC does not follow suit.
The ribbon is color-coded based on what kind of buried hazard it covers, and Bollig says it is used frequently worldwide. Blue means water, orange means communications lines are below and yellow signifies gas. Red tape runs over high-voltage transmission lines, and Bollig says he sells it as narrow as two inches and as wide as 24.
"You drive over this tape hundreds of times in a day in your car," he explains. "It's everywhere. I just can't understand why [ATC] would want to put up these monstrous, ugly poles instead of burying the line."
While speaking to the Middleton Common Council earlier this spring, ATC representatives argued burying the line is far too expensive, saying it can cost as much as three times what it does to carry it on poles.
Bollig admits that purchasing the warning ribbon is only a small part of the cost of burying the lines.
"It doesn't cost as much as you would think, and it's probably the cheapest part of burying the line," he said. "But I'm just trying to pitch in and help them make the right decision."
And Bollig says there is another more important cost the transmission giant should be worried about.
"The cost in ill will because ATC won't bury these lines is staggering," Bollig said. "It seems they should want the chance not to ever hear another farmer say his cows were effected by the lines and no one really knows for sure if they cause cancer yet because the research isn't done. That just seems like a greater cost."
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