Individual parts for the station are so outdated that technicians have to build spare parts for system repairs, which can cause severe service disruption for energy customers, said Water and Power General Manager Ron Davis.
"If it breaks down and there's a kind of part that we can't make, then we'll have customers who are out of service for days while we do a workaround ? or it could be weeks," Davis said.
Residents are aware that their homes draw power from the outdated distribution station because their lines are the first to experience an outage and the last to be put back online, Davis said.
"Electrically this station was never designed to carry the loads it carries today," he said. "Every summer this station is, reliability-wise, very problematic."
The city designed the station to accommodate 10 megawatts of power when it was built in the 1940s, which, at the time, was considered a high load capacity. Burbank's power system carries a 300-megawatt capacity today, Davis said.
Though the distribution station has continued to deteriorate, Water and Power just installed two new transformers at the station and some underground power lines, Davis said. As a result, the station will be better equipped to handle increased summer load volumes, even though the entire distribution station replacement will not be complete until July 2008.
Several efforts to replace the station failed because of the complexity of the project and high costs, Davis said. The replacement price tag is estimated at $19.7 million, but after several years of reserving funds , the time is right to tackle the project, Davis said.
"We've just put it off to the point where if we don't do it now, we're going to be explaining to you why we didn't," he said.
With the council's approval on Tuesday, Water and Power will begin accepting bids from companies that will handle both the design and construction of the project.
