The Radar Needed 1.2 Megawatts. Something At Camp Hero Drew 4.6.

AMAGANSETT, New York —

A 13.2 kilovolt circuit left the Amagansett substation, ran east along a pole line under the Napeague strip, and terminated inside the Camp Hero fence.

It had no revenue meter. It had no account number. It appears on no bill anyone has ever been shown.

From 1974 to 1987 it loaded, at its peaks, to 4.6 megawatts.

The AN/FPS-35 radar on that site is rated at 1.2 megawatts on its own nameplate. That is not a guideline. The waveguide run between transmitter and dish is dimensioned for a peak power, and the plumbing, not the tube, is the ceiling. Push 4.6 megawatts through it and it arcs.

We appealed to the wrong body

A utility's records are organised around accounts, and we had asked a utility for accounts. So in June we asked a protection engineer a different question: if a circuit existed that nobody paid for, what record of it would have to exist anyway.

The answer is the protection-engineering series, held by the state public service commission rather than the company. Relay coordination studies. Fault-duty calculations. And loading tapes — four-hourly demand and reactive figures on every circuit, kept so that after a fault somebody can reconstruct what the line was carrying when the breaker opened.

Nobody reconciles those tapes against anything. They are not money. They are the reason this story exists.

The line the ledger writes it off under

Three circuits leave Amagansett's east bus. Two end at revenue meters, and those two meters are the entirety of what we published in August.

The third is carried in the substation's own loss ledger as station service, remote.

Station service is real and is properly unbilled: it is the power a substation spends running itself, and a company does not invoice itself. Amagansett's own station service sits on the same ledger, in the same hand, at between 19 and 34 kilowatts.

Feeder Three is on that line at four thousand six hundred.

Given to two engineers, blind

We removed the site, the state, the customer names and the word radar, and gave the tapes to two power engineers who do not know each other. Each was asked one question. What is this load.

Dr. Ottoline Serrure-Blaikie, thirty-one years a protection engineer, returned a cycle: eleven minutes on, forty-nine off, running through the working day and often through the night. Prof. Casimir Ndlovu-Traherne, working separately and by different arithmetic, returned the same cycle to within forty seconds.

Both read the reactive component the same way — a large capacitor bank charging and dumping — and both said, unprompted, that the load is not a factory.

They disagree about the bank's size by a factor of two, and both reports run with this story in full, including that disagreement.

The only other power calculation in our vault, PX-2004, was worked for us in May by a transmission engineer. He was not invited onto this panel, because a reader who has been paid by this newspaper before is not blind to it.

What the man at the substation says

Wendell Prosper-Kiang worked the Amagansett switchboard from 1969 to 1984. He confirms a third east-bus breaker, and a standing instruction, given verbally and never in writing, that its operations were not to be entered in the shift log.

He has never been inside the Camp Hero fence and does not know what the circuit fed. We asked him twice, three weeks apart. Same answer.

The denial is the story

Peconic Light & Power's reply runs at the foot of this page and we have not cut a word of it. Merrill Aughterson-Vance makes three engineering objections, and the second takes the first away from him: instrument error of fifteen per cent, he writes, does not get you from 4.6 megawatts to 1.2, and he is not going to pretend it does.

Then he writes the paragraph that matters. No service agreement. No account. No load letter. No design memorandum. No correspondence. A right of way, a pole line, a termination structure, and a padmount enclosure inside a federal fence his company has never had a key to.

The line was energised before his company's earliest record and switched out in 1988 on a work order that gives no reason.

What is still locked

The single-line drawing for the inside of that fence would settle all of this in one page. It sits in the Camp Hero property file, at a federal agency, 143 days past the date the statute gives it to answer us.

We will publish it when it comes. If it does not come by 30 November we will publish the refusal, the file number and the officer who signed it.