Work will start in an estimated two weeks on burying the power lines and bringing municipal water to the town offices on Comeau Drive in Woodstock. Town supervisor Bill McKenna said the work was necessary to make electric service more reliable.
Central Hudson will supply the wire and transformer. The town highway department will dig the trench.
The trench will allow a water line and other future utilities to be buried.
“We do have generators, but they don’t run everything,” McKenna explained. “And in the meantime, since we’re going to be digging, we’re also going to run a water line to bring town water up to the buildings here.”
The offices currently use well water containing sulfur, so workers rely on bottled water.
The town has some Internet service from Spectrum. The line takes the same path as the current power lines. McKenna said he asked Spectrum to bury its lines, but it was too costly. “They sent us an estimate for $25,000, and we said, Leave it in the woods,” McKenna said.
When Archtop Fiber brings service to town in about two or three years, a line will be run up Comeau Drive, he added. “The thing I will say about the Spectrum line, even though it comes in the same woods, it is a hardier line, and it’s less likely to break,” McKenna said. “I don’t think we’ve had an outage due to them coming through the woods like we do with the electric.”
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