Van Halen’s Jump starts blaring from my phone at 1AM the morning on Christmas Eve. No it’s not an alarm, it’s my ringtone. If that song doesn’t get you going for the day… we cannot be friends… The call was from… gee let me think… who else calls me at 1AM… Work. Time to bundle up and head out into the frigid cold and replace a power pole that someone had hit by a van. The roads are icy, it’s 7F outside with a nice 10mph breeze… this is gonna be a lovely morning to replace a pole.
Welcome back Hivers to another edition of A Day With A Lineman. This is my attempt to show some of the events and crazy stuff I experience during my career as a High Voltage Lineman. I also try to provide a little insight into what we do to repair, build, and maintain the electrical grid.
This time around it wasn’t the weather, trees, birds, or tractors causing problems. It was the dreaded Mini-Van sliding off the road and destroying a pole. A pole that we just changed out a month prior during a line rebuilding job. As mentioned before, it’s frikken COLD and the roads have a nice layer of snow and ice on them. Mix that with it being the holidays and people being a little more “relaxed” behind the wheel and you get some of this action.
Everyone in the vehicle was just fine. A little tipsy from the 1/4 bottle of whiskey that was lying on the ground next to the car. But all in all good health otherwise. A Woman was driving with a male passenger about the same age. This may not seem like anything but when a Guy shows up later looking for his wife… it raises a few eyebrows if you know what I mean. :wink:wink
I had about an hour drive to get there due to the nasty slick roads. By the time I arrived the guys had done some switching to minimize the outage. Instead of having 20 or so customers out of power, there was only 4. We do this whenever possible.
Now it’s time to clean up this frikken mess. Though I do like how the transformers were hung by the pole with great care…
Those transformers are total junk, so we just cut them off the pole and let them hit the ground. Got out the chainsaws and cut the pole into chunks and stacked them off to the side.
Toss those mangled up transformers to the side with the mini excavator…
While a few of us were on the cleanup crew, a few other lineman were in the yard framing up a new pole and grabbing other material. Toss the pole up on the truck and it is ready to go. The service center is only 2 blocks away from the accident which made things nice. You know just in case we missed grabbing something that wasn’t on our trucks.
Digging with an auger on the LineTruck in this cobblestone ground is horrible. That’s why we brought out the mini excavator. It made quick work of digging this 6-1/2ft deep hole. Once the pole was in the ground I decided to do a little light reading while we got trucks shuffled around.
The sun started to come up while we were laying out and fixing all the broken and damaged wire that was on the ground. Then it was time to fly the wire up and land it on the insulators. It wasn’t getting any warmer outside but we were getting closer to to being finished.
We just had 2 spans of wire on the ground, so we laid the wire up on the middle pole first. Then pulled it up to the pole on the east end and then we will bring it up to proper tension on the west end with hoists.
We had to be really be careful and control the ends of the wire as we were bringing it up. You see the backside of each of the end poles was still energized at 7,200 volts. We use the orange protective covering for any sort of incidental contact.
After using hotsticks to properly cover the energized line, we hung our insulators and hoists and got ready to bring up the wire and sag it.
Anyway, all we had left to do was hang the new transformers and bring up the service wire to the houses and connect them.
Just to add a time frame to this type of outage, guys first got called around midnight. The Lineman get there and make the area safe for emergency response people and tow trucks to get the people and vehicles out of the way. We energized the transformers around 8AM, then had some cleanup to do. Finally hop in my bucket truck and warm up a bit on the drive home.
Big thanks for stopping by and taking the time to check out what us Lineman do to keep the lights on.
If you ever end up in a situation like this stay in the car. Call 911 and wait for the proper people to come and make the area safe. Granted if your car happens to be on fire that’s a different story. Always stay clear of any wire on or near the ground and contact your local power company.
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