Pole Farming is what us Lineman around here call it when a farmer is working their field and they get a little too close to a pole. It doesn’t take much for those powerful tractors to tear a pole down. This year the local farmers have been doing a great job not tearing the powerlines down or knocking poles over. Considering they feel the need to get as close to the pole as possible and farm every square foot possible. Max profits… Well that all gets wiped out when a farmer has a little whoopsie with a pole and starts a little fire.
A Day With A Lineman #32
Pole Farming
Welcome back to another edition of A Day With A Lineman. Not too much excitement as of late. Just the normal daily grind and routine maintenance of the electrical grid. Just the normal and never ending suicidal birds sticking their beaks where they don’t belong. We made it through the fire season with no major events. That’s unheard of around here!! Not to say that there wasn’t any fires, just no fires that burnt a bunch poles down.
After wheat harvest, many farmers choose to burn their fields off. Getting rid of the wheat stubble. When I got a call about a fire I assumed a farmers “controlled burn” got outta hand and we needed to go save some poles from being burnt to the ground. Welp, I was wrong… there was a bit of a fire but that isn’t what caused this pole to go down. The pole going down is what caused the fire. The local fire department make quick work of getting the fire out.
Shortly after taking a look at things, I knew the farmer plowing the field is the one to blame. Looking at the anchor and down guy it’s pretty obvious. That steel guy wire doesn’t just coil up like a pig’s tail without some serious force.
This section of powerline was rebuilt about 5 years ago. I would expect an old pole to explode and split in half but not a new one like this. That farmer obviously didn’t stop once making contact with the steel guy wire. Just kept right on plowing. The whole top of the pole broke off and split the bottom half right down the middle.
Time to make a phone call and get some help coming this way with a new pole and material. There were a couple of us out here already and we had a guy standing by waiting to get the info on what size pole and what kind of hardware and material he needed to load up.
After giving ourselves a visual open point in the line and installing our protective grounds, we got to work cleaning this mess up.
Not sure how this wire got all messed up when it is this far away from the pole but… that’s gonna need to get fixed.
We got the wires free from the pole and tied them off to the trucks to hole them out of the way. Then the LineTruck showed up so we can pull the rest of the pole out of the ground.
Get the auger out and clean out the pole hole and get it to the correct depth. The rule of thumb for pole depth is 10% of the pole length plus 2 feet. So if it’s a 40ft pole the set depth would be 6 feet.
A few more pieces of hardware to add and this pole is ready to get stuffed in the hole.
It’s a bit of a reach from the road up into the field. This field has a pretty steep slope to it and that top heavy LineTruck is safer being down there.
It was pretty sketchy flying our buckets in the air. No flat ground to park on and we need to lift the wire up onto the new pole. It’s really amazing how stable these little bucket trucks are.
We made quick work of getting the wire up and tied into the insulators. The neutral wire was damaged pretty bad, so we had to cut out the bad piece and replace it with a new chunk of wire.
As the sun was setting all we had left to do was remove our protective grounds and energize the line. Perfect timing, got everyone’s light on just before it got dark.
It took us about 4 hours from the time I got called to the time we energized the line. Depending on what is on the pole and the location of the pole can change the amount of time it takes dramatically!! I have had pole take 8,9,10… even 12 hours to replace. Big wire, multiple cross-arms, limited accessibility, broken wire all over the place, adjacent poles have damaged hardware… the list could go on. I’m just happy this one was a pretty easy one and we could get the power back on for everyone in a short amount of time.
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