ORANGE BEACH, Ala. -- Anyone wondering what all activity involving big trucks and heavy equipment in the vicinity of the Orange Beach Justice Center is all about, got a few loud hints overnight on March 15-16.

It came in the form of a loud hammering sound that awakened residents four times through the course of Thursday evening and into the wee hours of Friday morning.

The cause of the noise, which was heard in many parts of East Orange Beach, was simple to explain. The overall reach of the project involved is mind boggling.

A giant underground boring project is underway from Sapling Point on Wolf Bay’s northern bank to a substation east of the Orange Beach Justice Center.

“We’re having a bore of an underground transmission line occurring between Sapling Point on the north side of Wolf Bay that’s going underneath Wolf Bay, underneath and between the library and the senior center, underneath Canal Road and up behind the substation, directly east of the Justice Center,” Director of Engineering and Environmental Services Kit Alexander said.

PowerSouth, a major electrical supplier in the southern part of Alabama and where Baldwin EMC buys its power, is conducting the bore that is more than a mile long.

The purpose is to create a redundant power supply to the city in the event of a natural disaster and to foster future growth.

“It’s the first bore of its kind in the world and it’s a major undertaking,” Kit Alexander, Director of Engineering and Environmental Services, said.

According to a presentation by PowerSouth to city officials there are two feeds of electricity to Pleasure Island. One is west of Alabama Highway 59 in Gulf Shores and the other is just west of the Orange Beach Expressway Toll Bridge.

“A total of six (6) substations are supplied by these two transmission lines,” the presentation said. “In the event that one line is taken out of service (due to maintenance or unplanned event) the entire peninsula relies on a single source of bulk electricity.”

According to a slide presentation to the city in November, the “Orange Beach Load is served from the Romar, Water Tower and Florida Avenue Substations. A single point of failure along the transmission system would cause multiple outages with potential long restoration time.”

Part of the process of getting that new line in place was the hammering heard in Orange Beach overnight March 15-16.

“What was going on was a 36-inch conduit was being pushed through the 60-inch casement pipe and on Thursday night the pipe was very near the end of that push,” Alexander said. “The more pipe that goes through that casement pipe, the more friction there is.

“And it needed to have additional hammering to get that pipe to come out by the Justice Center.”

After three or four instances of a powerful air hammer pushing on the pipe, it came out of the ground just before dawn on March 16.

Alexander said the crews celebrated the feat.

One of those not celebrating was Gary Farrow of Bay Drive on Wolf Bay.

“It sounded like someone was pounding on a bass drum on your back porch,” Farrow told the City Council.

Alexander said the noise not only carried over the water but through and out of the pipe at the Orange Beach end as well.

“That 60-inch pipe served as an amplifier,” Alexander said. “All that noise was coming out of the end of that pipe, plus it was coming across the bay.”

Alexander said there should be no more great noise events associated with the project and was exploring setting up an email notification system to warn residents before any more occur.

“But this is such an essential project that there’s really no way around it,” she said. “We’re lucky that it’s been successful so far and we haven’t had worse problems with it.”