Without them, no one could see any Olympic nighttime events, no competitors would know their event times, no distant media outlet could disseminate their Games information. There literally would be no fire within.
You could not have an Olympics without them.
Yet, like a good umpire at a baseball game, utility companies are thought to be doing a good job if no one notices them.
That's true even without the Olympics, but even more so during the Games. A single hiccup has the potential to be instantly noticed by thousands, if not millions.
But investments of millions of dollars, years of planning and dozens of incorporated redundancies have power, telecommunications and natural gas providers feeling confident they're as prepared as possible. Through the first few days of the Olympics, that preparation has paid off. Glitches, if any, have been minor.
"Test events before the Olympics gave us a sense of the magnitude of the project, and there is pressure, no doubt," said Gordon Broussard, vice president in charge of the 2002 Winter Games for Aggreko LLC, which is supplying temporary power for broadcasting, security, timing and results operations and information technology.
"When you've got a broadcast being watched by 70 million people (in the United States), there is some anxiety about things going well. But we've been doing this a long time, and being involved in the Atlanta Games and the Super Bowls, we know what to build in so that there's some redundancy and we can sleep at night."
Aggreko LLC, the U.S. division of U.K.-based Aggreko PLC, is the primary or secondary power supplier at Olympics-related sites. But powering big events is nothing new for the company, which has done so at broadcast compounds and halftime shows at the past 14 Super Bowls.
"This (event) is probably the biggest temporary power installation we have done when you factor in the size of the project, the importance of it and the conditions for us to deal with," Broussard said. "Think of the power needed for the cameras along the courses, starting at the base and going to the top. It creates a whole different list of obstacles."
The company has brought in 107 people to help out during the Games, following 18 months of setting up equipment and cables ? including enlisting the help of helicopters and rock climbers.
The company's portable generation system features more than 3,000 electrical distribution panels, 250 transformers and 350 generator sets. The equipment will move on to other events or industrial and manufacturing customers after the Games, but while it's here it pumps out enough juice to supply a city of 100,000 people.
Its Olympic duties include providing standby power for the International Broadcast Center (Utah Power is the primary provider there); temporary prime power to multiple media compounds, including TV cameras, production trucks and satellite uplinks; power for increased security screening areas and added security trailers for the U.S. Department of Defense; secondary power for all venues' timing/results operations; and standby power for information technology networks linked to venues via fiber optic feeds.
Complementing the Aggreko activities is the local service provider, Utah Power. So far, so good for that company's Olympics power activities.
"The service to the venues has been without incident," company spokesman Dave Eskelsen said. "It's gone really well. There have been a reasonable number of operational kinds of corrections and needs that have come up at the last minute, but the crews assigned to each venue, with a venue captain, have really served us well.
"There is always the unknown. One of the reasons we elected to post captains and crews at each location is so there would not be any transit issues. Other Olympics have had that, but we believe we have all the bases covered."
One non-venue problem flared up during the opening ceremonies when about 2,000 customers in Park City lost power. That outage lasted less than three hours and was fixed in time for TV viewers to see the caldron lighting.
Another smooth operation so far has been Olympics-related telecommunications. AT&T, which is handling long-distance voice and data, wireless services, paging and CATV systems, and Qwest Communications International Inc., which is handling local voice and datacom services, Yellow Pages, public telephone and digital wireless services, both had praise heaped upon them last week.
"What we're seeing so far is near-flawless delivery of telecommunications to all of our constituency groups, and we're very pleased with the cooperation among them," said Sharon Kingman, managing director of communications for the Salt Lake Organizing Committee.
"Telecommunications is generally one of those functions that people don't think about, and we like it like that."
Denver-based Qwest has been thinking about it for three years. Its $100 million investment in the Olympics has included a venue operations center to serve as the focal point for its Games operations and a new fiber optic network overlying its existing system to allow for transmission and rerouting of communications.
"We are not anticipating any problems," said Bonnie Anderson, Qwest's vice president of local networks in Utah. "We have not had any, to this point."
One reason for the no-problems experience is that the network is "self-healing," meaning it can automatically reroute communications in less than 50 milliseconds if a cable is cut.
The new broadband system contains 31,000 miles of fiber, enough to cover an Olympic ice hockey rink end-to-end 820,000 times. The network is able to transport 388 trillion bits per second, enough to allow each of the 3,500 Games athletes and officials to simultaneously send about 11,000 photos in one second. Using a dial-up modem, nearly 7 billion people ? more than the Earth's total population ? could log on to the Olympic Games network simultaneously.
Wireless communication also has been without flaw. Qwest said that during the opening ceremonies, it completed about 725,000 wireless calls with no blockages due to capacity shortcomings. During that same period, AT&T completed 135,000 wireless calls.
Through Feb. 10, Qwest had connected 1.7 million wireless calls without any blockages. "And I will add that our system is not yet even breathing hard yet," Anderson said.
"We couldn't be more thrilled with how well it's worked," Kingman said, adding that 57 test events prior to the Games helped ensure sufficient capacity. "All in all, from our perspective, things couldn't be going better."
Perhaps smaller in scope but more visible is the Olympic contribution of Questar Corp.'s shareholders. The Salt Lake-based company is fueling the caldron flame at Rice-Eccles Olympic Stadium and a smaller version at the Olympic Medals Plaza.
If the stadium flame were somehow to be extinguished, it would be obvious. But don't expect that to happen.
"It will not go out, due to the redundancies, and there are several," Questar spokesman Chad Jones said.
"We've been excited to be involved with this from the beginning, working with the designer and builder and providing them with information about local gas composition, pressures and flow rates."
What's keeping the stadium flame burning is about 8 million BTU of natural gas per hour. The caldron will burn enough during the Games to supply 27 to 30 homes in the Salt Lake area for a year.
"We've done all we can do to this point," Jones said. "We have people on duty at the caldron around the clock, and there are people who live close to our facilities that are keeping an eye on things."
Questar has had to buy a little extra gas to meet a somewhat higher demand caused by the influx of visitors to Utah. A normal winter day would see about 15,000 to 25,000 extra folks in Utah ? mostly skiers. The Olympics-time figure is 80,000 to 90,000 per day. Still, that extra load is only about the same as when the temperature falls a half-degree.
The Olympics may be just part of the Aggreko rsum but are once-in-a-lifetime events for spectators, competitors and, yes, local utilities.
"We feel that responsibility strongly," Eskelsen said. "There has been a tremendous amount of work the past two years to prepare for these 17 days. We're excited and pleased to be part of this. We're wanting to help Salt Lake City put on a good Games, and we hope we can continue to contribute to that and have a successful Games."
"This is all kind of exciting for the employees," Jones said, "to know that the gas we provide is associated with such a visible symbol of the Olympics."
E-mail: bwallace@desnews.com