About 10,000 homes on the Navajo reservation are without power — roughly 15% of its households.
But through an initiative called Light Up Navajo, members of the Yellow Springs Public Works department traveled out west to the reservation to connect power to homes that have never had electricity.
Light Up Navajo sets out to connect dozens of homes to electricity by inviting outside visiting utility workers to install the necessary equipment across 13 weeks. It’s organized by the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority.
Nonprofit power supplier American Municipal Power pays for workers’ travel while the Navajo Nation pays for food and lodging for the workers. Workers are paid wages by their employers.
The utility is deeply grateful for the line workers who raise their hand to help, said Deenise Becenti, government and public affairs manager for the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority.
“Just bringing that basic access to electricity, you know, it's a powerful change that families have been waiting years to experience,” she said.
Yellow Springs Public Works was one of 44 organizations to participate in the most recent program. It sent out five line workers to stay for a week in June.
The reservation spans 27,000 square miles and comprises parts of Utah, New Mexico and Arizona.
“The average temperature when we were there was right around between 95 to 105 (degrees Fahrenheit). And doing line work, we have to wear fire retardant clothes and they’re long sleeved shirts,” said Ben Sparks, superintendent of electric and water distribution for the village of Yellow Springs. “And then the wind. There were 35 to 50 mile an hour winds out there, blowing the sand constantly.”
There’s a long process to get projects shovel ready. It can take several months to get the necessary permissions, including federal and tribal, as well as complete the engineering and design work to map out how each home can be connected to the grid.
It's much more drawn out than what it looks like locally, said Sparks.
“Here, it's just a process of getting the electric wiring run in your house and going up here to the building office and filling out your permits. As everything gets done, it's a matter of us just going and putting just a little bit of wiring in,” Sparks explained. “It's not this huge drawn out process where we have to build a five mile line just to get to you.”
Sparks said Yellow Springs Public Works is signed on to take part in Light Up Navajo again in July. He recalls one family his team helped to connect to electricity that showed the impact of their work.
“As soon as I flipped on the breaker, there was a ceiling fan that was mounted (that) kicked on and the kids were all screaming. And then the grandma was actually–you could see tears coming down,” he said.
There were 170 homes connected this summer.
Becenti said receiving power allows families to sustain and steward their land that’s been passed down for generations.
“Their nearest neighbor can be miles away. And so extending power lines to these isolated homesteads is a daunting task. But we're doing all that we can to help bring modernization to the families that are living in these isolated areas,” she said. “It's really helping to establish change for future generations.”
