Burke Electric To Expand Inspection Services with Thor Poletest™
Washington State based Burke Electric www.burkeelectric.com are well known for their expertise in heavy industrial electrical construction and their commitment to safety and sustainability. They are set now to expand their inspection services to large scale timber utility pole inspections after adopting ‘state of the art’ Thor Poletest™ technology. The NDT technology, originally developed in New Zealand is widely used around the world to quickly and accurately assess the strength and serviceability of timber utility poles, and unlike all other inspection technologies examines the whole pole from its ‘below ground’ base to its tip in a single test.
Burke Electric’s Dominic Burke saw the opportunity to use the tech much more widely, after first using it to inspect pole assets for a major refinery client. “In addition to visual inspections our team would traditionally sound or sound, dig and drill poles, it’s time consuming and doesn’t produce the type of reliable and objective data our clients expect” says Mr Burke. Thor Poletest™ serviceability assessments proved to take less than 1 minute, greatly reducing the time at the pole and exposure to risks with Mr Burke going further to say “Getting to more poles safely and significantly faster means that we can support our clients (at scale) with the same quality they expect from our other services”.
Mr Burke is excited about the impact that Burke Electric and this technology will have on the asset management and replacement programmes of their state and interstate clients. “There is huge pole population in the region, and a significant backlog in testing, so there is good demand for services and tech that can economically deliver rich inspection information for large numbers of poles very quickly”. The Thor technology is sold as a license and was made available by San Diego based Invair Systems (www.invairsystems.com), a leading asset tracking and data provider to the US energy transmission and distribution industry.
