A Day With A Lineman #18

It seems no matter what we do, these stinking birds put nests everywhere!!

This nest caused an outage which ruined a transformer.

Normally we find a dead bird at the bottom of the pole but no bird this time, just 2 eggs that were destroyed and one that was still whole.

That’s one tough egg!!

What happens is the sticks from the nest contact the energized wire that supplies 14,400 volts to the transformer. The case of the transformer is grounded.
The nest is on the grounded transformer.
When the sticks get wet the voltage tracks down the stick and goes to ground causing a bit of an explosion.

Here are a few more pics of the damage.

It tried to burn up the whole nest but I think it was wet enough to not allow that to happen.

After cleaning the nest off you can see the bushing insulator is torched and cracked all the way down.

This farmer needed his pump for spraying his poisen on his wheat fields so we grabbed a new transformer and changed it out.

It might seem like this would be some nasty pain in the butt job, but when you have changed out a million transformers, it’s a piece of cake and only takes like 45 minutes. That’s if you have a transformer with you. Lol

Here is a little bonus picture of the view