A Day With A Lineman #20 Working On Some 115,000 Volt Poles

Welcome back to another episode of...

A Day With A Lineman

Hope everyone is enjoying the spring weather and enjoying their weekend. My Saturday didn’t start off too well.

Alarm blaring at 5am
I roll over and shut it off and think to myself, “Why didn’t I turn that stupid alarm off!”
Back to sleep I go, all comfy and cozey
AAAHHHH
I snap awake, and check what time it is.
6:10am
I know I am suppose to do something but what is it???!!
OH CRAP!!
I GOTTA GO TO WORK!!!
I’m already 10 minutes late at this point and I am in and out of the closet like Superman and a phone booth.

I hate waking up this way, but you can’t let a small thing like that determine the rest of your day. We normally don’t work on the weekend unless it’s an outage or somethings needs done and we have to coordinate with the customers. Before the irrigating season hits full swing we need to change a couple poles out.

They tend to bribe me into coming into work on my days off. How am I supposed to turn down Double-time (double-bubble) and doin my favorite kind of work, transmission work. Bigger wire, bigger poles, bigger everything!!

Man-Town

We have 2-70 foot poles to change and it’s all hands on deck. One of the poles is an easy one, a no brainer for an experienced Lineman. The other requires a bit of rigging and more thought goes into how to get the old pole out and the new one in. Then we need to decide how/what to use to hold the tension of the wire and get them out of the way to change the pole.

The first thing we do is...
Look at it
“Would you just look at that”

If you can see, 3 wires come from one direction and stop at the pole, then 3 more come from the other direction and stop at the pole. These wires are about the same diameter of a quarter, so it’s pretty big wire. They are connected by a jumper that is supported by a 100 pound post insulator.
If we were just to let the wire to the ground it would demolish the adjacent poles in either direction.

Up in the 95 footer we go

We use a 2-ton hoist and an 8 foot fiber sling to suck the wires together and release them from the Dead-end insulators.

Then we used the winch line on our 95 foot bucket to remove the dead-end porcelain insulators and one of the stack insulators t make room for the line-truck to grab the pole. Work smarter not harder, no sense on muscling there heavy insulators around.

Next we wrestle the wires together and hold them out of the way with the bucket truck’s winch line, while the line truck (digger-Derrick) and backhoe get to work removing the old pole.

With a steel cable choked around the pole and the pulling force of the line-truck’s winch line maxed out, this pole wasn’t budging. That is where the backhoe comes in and gets to play for a bit.
Digging all around the pole and smashing into it a few times, jarred it loose and the pole just popped right out of the hole.

So now the pole is vertical in the air and we need to get it horizontal in order to lay it on the ground. A couple guys push the bottom of the pole one direction as the line-truck operator lowers his line and lays it on the ground.
Simple as that 😉

New pole goes up just the way the old one came down. While all this is goin on, we are stuck in the air holding the wire out of the way.
Glad the other guys are done with their pole and they can clean up and tear apart our old pole.

And just like that the new pole is in the ground turned the right direction and perfectly straight up and down.

We have a newer style dead-end insulator that is made out of a specific polymer. So they are really light weight but they are a bit longer than the old porcelain insulators. The post insulators are the same as the old, made of porcelain.

Don’t attempt a selfie with another Lineman in the bucket

Photo bomb

We then place the wires at their appropriate positions on the pole and get to work dead-ending the wire to the new pole. Here is the first one, that jumper looks like crap having kinks and press sleeves in it so we installed brand new shined ones in

My hands were busy and didn’t have a moment to snap any pics of the progress, but here is it in all her glory.
70 feet of pure goodness that will last 30 or more years.

I came up through my apprenticeship and most of my career working transmission voltages and doin this sort of work. It was good to be able to teach a fellow lineman a thing or two about doing this sort of work. Not every lineman has experience in transmission voltages/work.
Key to success
Never stop learning
And never stop
Teaching others
Share your knowledge and take advice from others.