About the time I got off work the wind just started to pick up. The trusty weather report said to prepare for 25mph winds. I figured we way have an outage or two tonight, but I am not on standby so those other guys get to go out and play in the wind... and rain. Around 10 pm that wind was rippin'!!!! The cover on my camp trailer managed to survive but it slapping around had my up and down all night. That is until 3 am when my phone rang....
A Day With A Lineman #15
I am going to be honest, I am really glad I wasn't one of the guys on standby. Those poor guys had to go up into the wind farm and replace 2 poles that had blown down. They got the call around 10pm. If it is windy down here in the valley... it would really blow to be up at the wind farm. :wink:wink Here in town the airport reported 70mph winds... wait a minute?!?!? The weather guru said gusts of 25mph... dang liar...
Anywho, working in the rain is one thing, not fun. But working in 50-70mph winds with a touch of rain... will most definitely have you will hating life real fast... unless you have the right mind set... (a few screws loose). So ya I was happy I wasn't the first to get called during this storm. I did get called at 3am to investigate an outagein the foothills. That resulted in a tree getting blown over and causing the energized phase to contact the neutral. Therefore tripping the circuit breaker that supplies electricity to some people living in the mountains. It was a quick fix, but it did take a good amount of time to run out. We ended up having to clear a few trees out of the road and I also found a trampoline in the middle of the road... Yep, you will have that when there were wind gusts of that magnitude.
After getting those customer's power restored, I checked into the office to see what else was going on. It so happens that not to far from where I was located there were a few people out of power. The few customers without power were on the same phase. The other customers that are on the other 2 phases have power. We got a phase down somewhere... Then as I rounded this corner I saw wire drooped down and laying on the road. 1...2...3....4 spans of wire were laying on the ground in the middle of the road. Then I found the issue...
2 poles had blown down and were laying in the middle of the road. The phase that was contacting the ground is the phase that is de-energized and burn in half in a few places. First thing we need to do is make this place safe. We each headed to opposite ends of the wreckage and blocked the road. I made contact with the county to get this section of the road barricaded off. Once that was done we needed to get this section of line de-energized ASAP. With no way to backfeed this section of line these people are gonna be out of power for a few hours. Sometimes it just happens like that, it sucks but there isn't much we can do.
With another Lineman on the way to the shop, I took a mental note about what materials we would need and the process to get these poles replaced safely. First thing is load up a couple poles and material then get back out to the jobsite. Then we have a tailboard where we discuss safety hazards, procedures, special precautions, where the line is opened up at and where to place our protective grounds. This was everyone is on the same page with what is happening.
With this whole section of line de-energized, we need to isolate it from any other possible sources by removing jumper wires. This gives us a visual open in the line. After that we test and ground the line on both sides of the work location. Now we are good to get to work
A couple guys worked on getting the wire put back together. It had burnt in half in a few different spots. This cause the wire to run back through a few poles and sag down to the ground.
When the wire hit the ground, the arc generates so much heat that it forms bubbles of glass and burn the aluminum wire in half
In order to get the broken poles out of the way, we needed to get the side tension off the lines in order to safely remove them from the old broken poles. So using the front winch on my truck, I hooked onto the pole top to keep it from moving. If we were to just cut the pole into chunks, the pole top could sling-shot back in line with the other poles. With only the pole top remaining, I let off on the winch and we walked the pole top back in line.
We left the wire attached to this pole and headed to the next pole to do the same thing.
Once the wire was all put back together and the side tension has been relieved, it was time to free these pole top up and get them out of the way. The wire ended up floating about 4-6 feet off the ground. Which works out great for us.
Now its the easy part. Yank out the old pole and put a new one in its place. We did change the style of framing on one of them because it made it a lot easier and faster for us replace. With one pole in the ground it was time to move onto the other.
While 3 of us were setting these couple poles, one guy took off to the adjacent structures to loosen/remove the ties that secure the wire to the insulator. This will all the wire to have equal tension on all the spans of wire effected by the broken poles.
After both poles are set, the wire gets lifted into place and secured to the insulators. Then we go back to the adjacent poles and tie those back in.
Now all that is left is to have a little tailboard about the process of re-energizing the line. Remove grounds, install jumpers that were removed for visual opens, then do a little Drop and Pick. A Drop and Pick is when we have to kill the power in order to perform certain switching procedures. In this case we can't pick up this much load using hotsticks and clamps. So we kill the power at an recloser (basically a circuit breaker), place the jumpers back on, then pick up the load with the Recloser. It is the safest and easiest way to do it.
After chasing down a couple single outages things are once again back to normal. The wind was still blowing around 10-20 mph but nothing like the night before. The next day we sent one crew to go and help another utility that got his really hard by these strong winds and rain. I guess I drew the short straw and didn't get the opportunity to go. I will just have to stand by for that big snow storm that we are definitely due for.
Until next time,
Stay safe and always stay clear of downed powerlines. Just like this instance, the poles were laying on the ground but 2 of the 3 phases were still energized. This is a very very dangerous situation, all someone had to do is touch the wire... We have had cows walk up and contact energized phases after a pole had fallen over. Anyone want some meat?
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