It had been raining all night and all day long. Once the temp hit just above freezing, the rain turned to the heavy wet snow. The temps were just cold enough for the snow to stick on the grass but the roads were just wet. With all the rain we got down in the valley, there must have a been a ton of snow in the higher elevations. I swear once my wife and I talked about that, it wasn’t an hour later I get an outage call that everyone on Lewis Peak is outta power. YAY, lucky me! Up to the mountains I go
The on-call lineman is headed straight to the outage to verify where exactly the power is out. Me on the other hand, I went to the shop to get my bucket truck and load up the Side-by-Side (SXS). My 17,500 lb bucket truck can only do so much in the snow. It does alright but it can feel like it has ice skates on in a real hurry. Yes I have chains but it’s much easier to just jump in the SXS. Having the SXS will make patrolling the line that much faster and safer.
I stopped to take a better look at a couple poles with my spot light and had a tough time getting moving again. Even in 4 wheel drive she got a little squirrelly. So, I found a nice wide spot to park and unloaded the SXS and made my way up Lewis Peak trying to meet up with the other lineman on the call.
After finally meeting up with the other lineman, he told me he had cleared about 5 spans of snow loaded wire. Snow loaded wire is when the snow builds up on the powerlines and causes them to sag way down due to the weight of the snow. I’ve seen a pencil size diameter wire build up enough snow/ice to be 3-4 inches in diameter. All that weight on a 300+ foot span of wire puts a lot of stress on the structure.
When the snow decides to unload off the lines it causes them to gallop and slap together. This oftentimes causes the light in the house to blink but if a few spans unload at the same time it can knock the power out completely. We had a feeling this is what caused the outage and we believe our suspensions were right.
It’s really interesting because at a certain elevation the powerlines will have no snow/ice on them then the next span will be loaded up. Then from there on up the hill everything was loaded up, well besides the spans that decided to unload themselves.
We made our way back down to the circuit breaker knocking all the snow loaded spans on the way down.
Sometimes you can get away with smacking the base of the pole with a sledge hammer or giving it a few good mule kicks. A lineman buddy of mine said they built like a battering ram on the front of their SXS and just slam it into the base of the poles. Now that is funny right there. Smashing into poles with the SXS to knock snow/ice sounds kind of fun. We may have to build one for ours. :wink:wink
Most of the time we are doing this with the lines energized so we can’t just be all crazy. We may or may not have had the lines get together and cause an outage or 3…. Sometimes you gotta beat the crap out of them and other times you barely touch it and both the phase and neutral unload at the same time. Causing both lines to whip and gallop like crazy. It can get pretty violent but fun to watch. You know, blue fireball here and there…
Before we energized the line we remembered this one section that goes through a narrow corridor of tall skinny pine trees. Granted earlier in the year we widened it quite a bit, cutting down be chipping up dozens of trees. Yet we were still a little suspicious. These tall skinny pines can’t take much snow before the bend over and lay on the lines. We headed back up the hill to make 100% sure we didn’t have any other issues before energizing the line. Sure enough there were 2 small pines laying across the line. Unfortunately I forgot my phone and didn’t grab any photos. DANG IT!. The one tree was almost burn in half from the 3 times that the fault happened before the circuit breaker opened up. The home owner came out with a chainsaw in hand and cut them out of the way. “Hey pal, that’s my job.”. LOL.
What we thought was the snow unloading off the lines ended up being a dang tree. I’m sure glad we went back up to take a better look. Though if we would have closed in the circuit breaker it possibly would have burnt the tree off the line, or burnt the wire in half. Better save than sorry.
I’m sure the boys will be having fun in the snow, I’m on vacation for the next couple weeks. HA-HA Suckers. This is what I woke up to this morning, about 2 inches on snow on my truck. I bet they got double that where we were last night
Stay safe out there everyone, never approach downed lines and contact your local utility.
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