Harlan Electric was selected as the prime contractor to provide new replacement switchgear and back-feed all equipment throughout the William R. Snodgrass Tennessee Tower.  Harlan was responsible for all aspects of the project which included enlarging the room, building a new wall, entry doorway and certain concrete demolition and install.    Downtime was required to be limited to preplanned weekend outages. The concrete removal operation required noise abatement and planning for demolition activities high priority.  This building houses significant State of Tennessee government offices making security, coordination, and communication of all activities of utmost importance. 

The existing 50+ year old main switchgear was replaced with new 4160V, 1200 amp equipment.  Elapsed time from power off of old gear to new gear back online was less than 48 hours. There were a total of 71, 5kv terminations installed and all passed 3rd party testing on first pass with no disruption to the occupant’s operations.  The age of the building provided a significant challenge.  The gear sections height was only a single inch shorter than the elevator cab height.  The team devised a way of rolling the gear on and off the elevator on ¼ inch steel rods . . . leaving 1/2 inch clearance from the top of the cab.