It has been over six months now since a summer thunderstorm set off a chain of events that eventually led to a major fire in the Grand River Dam Authority’s Unit 2 coal-fired generator at the Grand River Energy Center (GREC). And for many of the employees who spend their careers helping to operate and maintain that facility, that July 1 evening was the beginning of a challenging time.

However, round-the –clock, those challenges are being met both by GRDA’s team and the contractors who are also there to help with the work.  Although the unit is still a few months away from returning to service, much progress has been made in the restoration effort. But to really tell the story about the effort, we need to do it through the words of those who have lived it for the last half year.

For employees like GRDA Superintendent of Power Station Electricians Dana Key, the work began even before the flames were extinguished. As he drove to the plant site that night, he said that even from miles away he could tell was going to be far from a normal call-out or quick repair effort. “But through a lot of long hours and a lot of long work and really a lot of people pulling together we seem to have been able to do incredible things,” said Key. “It’s been one of the most rewarding incidents that I’ve been in, just to see the amount of work and things we’ve been able to accomplish in a short time.”

GRDA Senior Electrician Kevin Couch echoed those comments. “We’ve spent a lot of time trying to make sure that everyone could do their jobs,” said Couch about his crew’s efforts to insure that contractors had the power and resources they needed to do their own restoration work. “Our primary goal was to do it safely.”

While always working safely, working together has also been the major theme of the restoration effort, according to GRDA Superintendent of Electrical and Controls Maintenance John Ladd. “Throughout this, we’ve done what we had to do at times,” said Ladd. “We have to work together and all come together for the common goal to get this thing going again.”

Perhaps Key summed up the effort best: “We’ve got some really incredible people that can do so many different things, he said, “and at times, when they are called upon, they just seem to pull together.”

For many members of Team GRDA, that has been the real story of the effort to return this unit to service so it can once again provide power to customers all across Oklahoma.

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