OPEN SKIES PROJECT

The First Major Hurdle - Power!

There are a lot of infrastructure projects we need to tackle on the base - water, sewer, internet, drainage, roads - but the first and most important has been just getting power hooked up on the property. At some point after the base and the Keweenaw Academy closed down, almost all of the power lines were removed and the tops of the power poles cut off. We're still not sure if that was part of the decommissioning or someone trying to make a few bucks on scrap, but it has presented us with quite the hurdle - how are we going to power all of these scattered buildings across the entire base? That's still a problem we are actively researching and considering several different possible solutions to. In the meantime, we have relied on a single power connection to run our main security camera setup with the outlying cameras operating on solar power and batteries. Surprisingly, this has actually worked incredibly well even through the cold winter, with only occasional outages on the coldest and longest of nights. However, this has also meant that any other power we needed had to come from portable gas-powered generators. This has been a bit of a problem with all of the power tools we use, and we've been working hard to get power installed before spring so we can get right to work as soon as the snow melts. And this week we are one step closer! Electricians have been out to the property several times in the last couple weeks to finish installing the meter and breaker panel in our primary building and we can actually see the light at the end of the figurative tunnel!

What did the Air Force use?

When the radar station was operational, the base's primary source of electricity was the local power grid. However, four enormous Nordberg diesel generators served as an emergency backup power source. These generators were located near the top of radar hill in the power house shown in the picture. Whenever severe weather threatened the area, the Air Force would fire up the generators and switch over to using them to power the base, just in case the storm were to knock out any of the local power lines in the area. We've also heard that the Air Force fully relied on these generators in the early days of the base, running them 24/7 before the public power lines were installed up the side of the mountain.

When the radar station closed down and the Keweenaw Academy moved in, they converted the power house to a gymnasium with a full basketball court. The original pedestals that held the power distribution equipment are still outside of the building, along with some of the above-ground fuel storage tanks and the below-ground service trenches for the power cables that ran to the radar towers.

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