Brunswick warns of utility pole work near Columbia Avenue Practice Field

Utility pole work moved into the Columbia Avenue Practice Field area in Brunswick on June 8, bringing trucks, drilling noise and a week of construction around one of the town’s active recreation spaces. The town said Central Maine Power’s Section 31 crews were ahead of schedule, and poles were to be brought to the park Monday before being installed through the week.

The warning matters most for people who use the practice field, nearby park space and the streets around Columbia Avenue and Columbia Way. CMP said crews would arrive around 7 to 7:30 a.m. and work from 8 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., with weather able to push the schedule around. That means the most visible disruption should come during the workday, when drilling, truck traffic and construction activity are expected to be concentrated near the field and along the route toward the Brunswick West Substation off Barrows Street.

The work is part of a much larger rebuild of CMP’s Section 31 transmission line, a five-mile corridor that runs from a substation near Crooker Construction in Topsham, through the Topsham Fair Mall area, across the Androscoggin River and into Brunswick near the Brunswick Golf Club. CMP says the line is 50 to 60 years old and has become more vulnerable to outages as it ages and faces more severe storms. The company says the rebuild is meant to improve reliability, add capacity and support growing electricity demand, including electric vehicles and heat pumps.

In Brunswick, CMP said the project includes installing steel poles in the Columbia Avenue park area and moving farther into the neighborhood as the rebuild progresses. The company also said ground mats have been laid from the park near Columbia Way toward the Brunswick West Substation, and that tree trimming was planned before June 1 on the Crimmins Field side of the line between Baribeau Drive and the corridor. Those are the kinds of staging details that usually mean a utility job is moving from paper plans to visible field work.

Town officials said the overall Section 31 construction timeline is expected to run about 12 to 18 months, so the Columbia Avenue activity is one piece of a longer project rather than a short repair job. Topsham and CMP held a public open house on January 28 to explain the rebuild, and the work now unfolding in Brunswick is the practical result: a neighborhood recreation area temporarily sharing space with utility infrastructure.