Your One and Only Steemit Lineman is back with yet another edition of...
A Day With A Lineman
# 29 Gettin’ Trashed at the City Dump
ZOOM ZOOM
It’s been a little quiet lately at work, not many crazy things have been happening. I guess that is a good thing in a way, you know customers are happy because there hasn’t been any major outages.
Ummm...
NO!!
This time of year is crazy busy and people want to get all their projects done before winter. That perfect 75 F weather is upon us here in the PNW. (Pacific NorthWest AKA God’s Country 😉) It’s the end of the work week for me and I have all kinds of hopes and dreams of enjoying a relaxed last day of the work before the weekend. Well that wonderful, amazing, perfect idea came crashing down...
crashing down.
The morning was cruising right along. Enjoyed my couple mugs of coffee, while I made frequent stops completing service order after service order. Shoot I even did some investigating for an electrician at a local winery, to find where the main feed to a pond pump was located.
Well it doesn’t come straight from the Transformer
So...
Oh Would you look at that,
There is a breaker inside the building labeled
“Pond Pump”
The electrician and I shared a few laughs over this one on the phone. Hey, it happens to the best of us even though most won’t admit to it.
After I left it wasn’t 10 minutes and my Fellow Serviceman/Lineman Gim-Dog called me and said we had some action at the city dump. Then an email rang in saying out main office blinked really bad too. Wait they are on different circuits but the circuits come from the same substation. I instantly thought, “This one it a good one!” Within a few minutes Gim-Dog called me and said all 3 fuses on the tap to the City Dump were blown. Believe it or not this is a good sign, because this means that we don’t have any energized wire floating or laying around in places where people can contact them.
As we met up inside the gates of the city dump the problem is pretty obvious
Someone or rather someone driving something hooked the Service wire that feeds their maintenance shop and tore the pole down.
4/0 triplex with an ACSR Nuetral
First things First, make the scene safe and work with the City Dump Workers to keep the dump operational but also give us the room we need to get this fixed. It didn’t take long before we found out what and how this whole thing went down. Get it.... went...down....uuuhhhh never mind.
So, there is this cool,relaxed guy that works at the City Dump and he hauls big dumpsters to warehouses and other commercial buildings. I’m talking HUGE dumpsters where you could fit 6-VW beetles inside no problem. Early to mid 50’s in age making his usual rounds in and out of the dump. Bringing in full dumpsters and delivering empty dumpsters. He is having a great morning, bacon and eggs for breakfast should tide him over until lunch. Plus there was still just enough of his favorite creamer left to add that perfect amount of flavoring to his travel mug of coffee when he left the house this morning. He didn’t appreciate the last sight he saw when he closed the door, the family dog doin the booty scoot across the floor.
It’s all good in his world, driving his truck with the window down enjoying a nice cool breeze and the stereo blastin’ his favorite country tunes.
Then around 11 A.M. it happened. He has passed under this service wire a bajillion times in this exact truck and never thought twice about it. Well I bet now he is going to think about everything he goes under in his truck from now on.
I am not sure if he forgot or if this is something they usually do when they are in transition from dropping off a full dumpster and picking up a fresh one. But this guy had the bed that the dumpsters ride on, up in the air
That truck had to have popped a wheelie when he got hung up on this service wire and tore this pole down
Not only did it break the pole off, it broke all 4 high voltage wires above that also have a steel core and bent a piece of 6 inch “C” channel steel inside the building that the service wire was connected too. This had to have been one pretty violent collision. Sometimes I wish I could catch one of these in action and see all the Arcy Sparkeys and watch the total carnage actually happen, instead of always seeing the aftermath.
One Day...
Okay let’s check out the damage and get to cleaning up and repairing this mess.
First thing is the oil that poured out of the transformer after it fell to its death. It’s non PCB and just mineral oil but we are still required to do a full clean up. Our warehouseman is bringing absorbent out to soak up as much off the road as possible. While the crew is gathering up materials and a new pole.
Before we go grabbing wire and cleaning up the broken pole we have to create a visual open and install protective grounds on the line.
After applying protective grounds on both sides of our work area Gim-Dog and I get to work cleaning up this mess of broken pole and tangled up wire.
As we were taking things apart and cutting the pole up into chunks, the thought dawned on both of us...
There are a couple things that need to be loaded up and taken back. Like the transformer and any material that is still in good shape that can be restocked in the warehouse and used on other jobs. The rest can just be piles up out of the way.
As the crew is working on getting a new anchor installed I was one pole away getting the wire situation figured out. I get all my rigging setup and ready to go while a couple other Lineman are getting the wire spliced back together.
This old pole butt was not budging. Tugging and pulling on it with the winch line of our Linetruck, we saw no signs of it budging. So we resorted to using the mini-excavator, which initially was brought out to clean up the oil spill that had reached the dirt.
We kept digging and digging and this sucker wasn’t budging. A 40-foot pole is set 6-feet in the ground and we were beyond that. Then finally it started to budge and we used the Mini excavator to beat on the pole butt to wiggle it loose and finally pull it out.
DANG!! That pole was around 10 feet in the ground. Even after getting hit that hard and broken off it didn’t loosen up the dirt enough to pull it out.
The guy standing next to this pole isn’t a small guy by any means. About 6-foot 1-inch and over 300 pounds, that’s Big Boy
We figured the pole initially was set at 6-feet then over time and the fact that we are at the City Dump the ground started to pile up a bit. You know, it is a landfill. So we installed a 5 foot taller pole and set the pole 5 feet shallower than the previous pole or at the correct depth. We should have gained around 10 feet of extra clearance so these City Dump guys shouldn’t have to worry about it.
I didn’t manage to get a picture but there just happened to be a school field trip scheduled for that day. Really?!?! Who takes their class to the City Dump for a field trip? Why don’t you go to the Museum or something, or a nature walk in the park? There are so many other places, why the Dump???
Anyway after getting the wire all back up and to the proper tension. The crew hung the transformer and got it ready to go while I worked with the electrician to get the service attached to the maintence shop and all the proper connections made.
We also thoroughly inspected all the services to ensure that nothing had been damaged during the incident. We really lucked out and didn’t have to pull new wire into their breakers. We did have to replace the meterbase which was ripped off the side of the building but that was pretty easy.
After making all the necessary connections and creating a nice organized mess of these services.
We were ready to energize this thing.
We removed our protective grounds and closed in the Fuses to energize the line that supplies electricity to the City Dump. Everything is back to the way it was before the incident plus slightly better.
Pressed connectors at the maintence shop
Upgraded meterbase
Not really that cost effective but I guess you gotta get improvements somehow.
Now doesn’t that just look nice?
👍🏻😉👍🏻
Thanks for stopping by and getting a closer look at what it takes to keep the electrical grid up and going.
Until next time
Steem on
and
Stay clear of down power lines or any overhead lines for that matter.
You never know if they could be energized or not.
Stay safe
Steemians