Touring Kerr Dam

KERR DAM — Passing under 13,000 volts of electricity, you can really feel the heat. Among the giant concrete structures, countless lines of pipes and wires running above his head, Rich Bonnes doesn’t seem to notice as he carries on with his Friday morning rounds, diligently flashing his light onto every dial and into every corner in every room.

Deep inside the power house, a fortress built into the cliffs at the base of the mighty Kerr Dam, he is looking, listening, and smelling as he goes, checking for abnormalities in the daily routine. A puddle of oil, water or a meter reading in the red could mean problems for Bonnes, one of the few dam operators and full time residents of the dam’s own small town.

Touring the power house is just one of the dam operator’s daily tasks. Whether it’s recording temperatures at each transformer, inspecting the switch yard, cutting the grass, plowing snow and giving tours to students, tourists and nosey reporters, to name a few, Bonnes is part of a team responsible for nearly every aspect of the facility’s maintenance, repair and operations.

“It’s never boring,” he said.

While ultimately the dam exists to produce electricity, that’s not all it does. Operators manipulate the lake’s levels for recreation and flood control, while also maintaining a river flow for fisheries downstream. Fourteen gates can be raised or lowered, three automatically change depending on the overflow need.

“The flow can change pretty rapidly,” Bonnes said, referencing several years ago when operators lowered the river in order to accommodate the recovery of a drowning victim downstream.

A reflection of the pride its workers have for the massive complex they are entrusted to maintain, there is not a single dust bunny resident to be seen, the cool blue paint appears fresh and even the operator’s glasses are smudge free.

“This project is in really good shape,” Bonnes said. “The guys that work here, they take a lot of pride in it.”

In fact, according to Bonnes, of the major equipment inside Kerr Dam, just one turbine, the third installed in 1954, has been replaced to date. Weighing 60 tons, PPL replaced the 78,500 horsepower turbine in 2006 with one rated to 115,850 hp, gaining 17 percent efficiency in the unit. The new turbine traveled on a 13-axel trailer all the way from York, Pa. It took seven months to replace the part in what Bonnes said was “quite a project.”

One of the oldest hydroelectric projects in the state, Kerr Dam is now a three-unit plant, but began operation in 1938 with just one. Five-hundred forty-one feet wide and 204 feet high, the dam is 83 feet higher than New York’s Niagara Falls. Penstocks, or pipes, 1,000 feet in length control the water flow. After its 200-plus-foot drop, the water is directed into buckets and creates the power needed to spin the 60-ton turbines.

Currently operated under a joint license with PPL Montana and the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, to build the massive structure called Kerr Dam was a monumental undertaking, especially during the 1930s and amid the Great Depression. The Flathead River was dammed at the sacred site of Pend d’Oreille Falls and the walls of the canyon were blasted on both sides. The project raised the level of Flathead Lake by 10 feet. Using the lake’s 1.2 million acre-feet water storage capacity and the force of gravity, the dam can generate enough electricity to power 145,500 households at full output. Last Friday, it was running at 178 gross megawatts, or enough to power roughly 133,500 homes.

“The water passes through about as fast as it can fall, in not even a second. It’s pretty amazing,” Bonnes said. “You’re taking water, running it through the units and putting the same water back into the river. Other than damming the river, you can’t get any more green than that.”

The energy produced by the falling water is even used to power the dam’s own operations, meaning it’s totally self-sufficient.

“If the whole state went black, we would stay on,” Bonnes said.

Before the 1980s, the facility was manned 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Now, the control room is largely computer controlled. Bonnes said that if Polson experienced an earthquake and operators could not access the dam’s controls to shut it down, PPL’s station in Great Falls could turn it off remotely.

Bonnes, an electrician by trade, has worked for PPL Montana for more than 20 years and at the Kerr Dam facility for the last six. Several of his fellow operators have worked at the site for more than 20 years. In all that time, Mother Nature, specifically lightning, he said, is the biggest consistent concern dam operators face because it can wreak havoc on the generators. While the summer months were busy maintaining lake levels for recreation, the goal now is to lower the lake level by two more feet by the end of the month, hitting it’s lowest limit by January.

“In the last six years, quite a bit has changed,” Bonnes said. “In the fall, there’s a lot to do to get ready for winter. Then in winter, we do maintenance. Summer is busy with managing water levels...  It’s pretty much something going all the time.”