A Day With A Lineman #38 ~ A Little Too Much...

Too much of something is often not good, even though I do like a good food coma every now and again :wink:wink So your one and only Steemit Lineman is back with another edition... episode... post... whatever... I just want to show you what happens when lightning hits some of the equipment out in the field. Sorry no car crashes or tractors tearing down the Powerlines. This time Nature’s Electricity is just too much for what we have out there on the system.

A Day With A Lineman #38

A Little Too Much...

This year has actually been a relatively quiet year for for major incidents taking out the local electric infrastructure. Being a big farming community, with hundreds of square miles of wheat, tractors absolutely tear stuff up!! They just have to farm that extra 1 foot closer to the pole.... BOOM down goes the pole. Now was that really worth it? Probably not?!? I really think the farmers have finally gotten the hint... * Stay Away From The Poles*

This guy, he didn’t hit a pole but he did manage to run his tractor over the top of a junction box. Mind you this junction box has underground cables carrying 14,400 volts in them and the box sits about 3 feet tall and about 6 feet long. Well it isn’t that big anymore LOL

I’m just glad he stopped when he did and didn’t run his tow-behind mower over the top of it. The funny part is once we showed up... he got back to mowing down the weeds like nothing happened granted he didn’t see the junction box due to the weeds around it being soo tall and green. They camouflaged it pretty well. So I give him the benefit of the doubt on this one. Keep On Keepin’ On Buddy!! We will get this fixed, don’t mind us. HAHAHA

That didn’t take long now did it? I didn’t go too far off topic but just enough to keep you interested right? In my defense, he did have Too Much of something. In his case it was probably that there were too many weeds or maybe it was the... weed?!?! Hmm at any rate, there are actually quite a few things I come across on a days basis that just don’t seem worthy to create a post about. Like that last one, I didn’t stay and fix, I had other outages to run on so the crew fixed it. They set 2 poles next to the new junction box that were about 10 feet tall. He should see it next time.

This one I, being the weirdo that I am, find this so fascinating, and it’s like artwork to me. Plus it just demonstrates the true power of electricity.

I imagine everyone has seen videos of lightning strikes off in a distance, or even experience them close up and in person. I could sit there and watch a lightning show in the surrounding hills for hours. The anticipation of when and where the next one is going to hit is what gets me. Then seeing that lightning bolt come down from the sky, then wonder what it hit and what kind of damage it has done.

Over the past week or two we have had a few good rain storms that brought with them some good lightning and thunder. Thank goodness it rained quite a bit before the lightning because I bet we would have had to deal with some serious fires around here. Instead we dealt with a couple outages during the storm, then days later we found more issues.

Like I mentioned before I live in a big agricultural area. If a house is out of power we will know right away, but if a pump doesn’t have power we won’t know until the farmer goes and tries to use it. Well that’s not 100% true because we have meters that “Talk” back to our substations through the Powerlines themselves. So from our main office we can “Ping” the meters to see if they are working. After a stormy weekend, it’s almost guaranteed that we will be chasing down some blown fuses.

Like this for instance, I don’t know where the lightning hit or it it was even lightning but something got really hot and melted the bird guard right off this transformer.

That is the top of a transformer, it is suppose to look like this with the bird guard on it.

Where did the grey bird guard go you might be asking... how about a puddle on top of the transformer.

Even I would think this bank of transformers is toast, no good, trashed, garbage, junk, piece of sh.... Nope!! They are perfectly fine, I refused the cutouts and closed them in and the output Voltage was just right. Off to the next one. I couldn’t tell if it took a direct hit right there or what, but something happened and sometimes you just never know. That is when the heart starts beating just a little faster when you are about to attempt to close the fuse back in to energize it. Like this one for instance...

I closed in a 40 amp fuse to energize this transformer and it blew the doors open. Yes it was loud, like a dang bomb going off. As you can see, I hope, it ripped the nut through the metal on one door and bent the 2 rods that latch the other door closed. It was completely locked up but that explosion from a bad lightning arrestor inside the transformer had enough force to blow the doors wide open. Amazing

So back to this lightning business. I had one more call from a farmer come in about his pump not working, so I headed over to investigate. A couple spans away the overhead wire is laying on the ground and all 3 fuses on the transformer bank were blown. After getting some help coming to fix this mess and finding a place to de-energize this tap I notice the pole with the transformer has some blown lightning arrestors and a nice black mark on the pole. Now why would that cause the wire to break two spans away?? It’s aluminum with a strand of steel in the middle, that stuff doesn’t just fall down!

After de-energizing the line and installing our protective grounds I could get a better look at why the wire may have broke and fell to the ground. It took a direct hit!! I mean that is enough Voltage to send someone back in time!! That is if they have the flux capacitor 😉

I don’t think that insulator was rated for that amount of Voltage do you? Just to give you an idea of what it is suppose to look like....

See anything missing?? Hahaha... Yep, That aluminum tie wire... she gone!

That good insulator is maybe 6 inches away from the one that got destroyed. Yet not a mark on it!! Crazy!!! Here is a closer look at it, let’s zoom in on that damage.

I have no idea why I get caught just looking at this sort of stuff up close and staring at it.... I know I’m a weirdo but you think it’s cool too right?? I used to have chunks of glass I dug up from the ground. They were created when the Powerlines would hit the ground while energized, it would turn the sand into glass. Ya, it is a little hot wouldn’t you say?

Well let’s stack that cool looking destroyed insulator next to the other couple we have in our bullroom and call it a day!!

Until Next Time...

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