A Day With A Lineman #8 ~ Into the Night

over 3 years ago

Welcome back to another edition of A Day With A Lineman. From dusk til dawn we handled outages that came in that day due to the extreme windy conditions that day. From one end of our system to the other. From the wheat fields to the mountains. The outages just rolled in and we just rolled from one outage to the other. It’s makes for a nice long Day With A Lineman.

It all started when we had to head out to the northern most part of our electrical grid. When heading out there we always prepare for the worst and hope for the best. “Easy outage... Easy Outage” Is what tends to run through our minds during the hour long drive. With wind speeds hitting 50+ MPH things aren’t looking too promising for an easy one. The skies quickly filled with dust from the barren land and recently harvested wheat fields. Then here came the smoke from the fires burning north of us. Talk about nice air quality... Hey anyone got a mask? :wink:wink

Finding the cause of the outage in this area of the system can take hours. There are no roads that follow the pole line but there sure are a lot of steep hills and little canyons that won’t hesitate swallow up a vehicle.

I was about 15 minutes behind my partner because I had to grab the side by side. That thing is a must in this territory. Winding around the gravel road up and over the top and dropping down by Lower Monumental Damn I see a cloud of dust coming up the road.

“What did you find?”
“You won’t believe it... just a bird. It’s re-fused and energized”
“No way!!! That never happens out here!”

Down to the bottom of the hill to turn around and then start the trek back to the shop. That is under another call comes in...

”A tree fell and started a fire and the fire department is onsite. Everyone on Lewis peak is out of power along with Mud Creek”
“Welp, let the fun begin! We are on our way*”

After verifying the power was out, creating a visual open point, and installing protective grounds, it was time to clean this big walnut tree off the line. It had broken one wire and had the other wire pinned down. With the wire pinned down there is a huge amount of tension. Freeing it up takes some patients and carefully placed cuts. It’s like playing with a loaded gun or rather a sling shot.

We typically don’t get winds of this speed from the north. I don’t think this old half dead walnut tree was ready for it either. The wind totally uprooted it and fell the old tree into the line. Pushing the energized wire into other trees and eventually breaking the wire and starting a little fire.

Next to the road was a ditch filled with blackberry bushes. At one point just after I freed the wire from under the tree, there was a flare up. There were a couple of the trees that were still standing that were smoldering and ambers would fall into the brush from time to time. With the wind ripping through there those little fires took off pretty fast. If it would have hit the wheat field on the top of the hill, there would have been no catching it.

The tree is now out of the way, the trees that are still standing that were on fire have been either put out or cut off and wire is back up and connected. Time to energize this line and head off to the next one. The city crew will clean up the rest of the tree and the fire department with stand by to ensure nothing flares back up again.

Time to head to the woods and see what is going on there. We got a report of another section of line that is out. After another 45 minute drive we arrived at the point where the line opened up. A piece of equipment called a reclosure is open, this means there was a fault on the line down stream of this device. A recloser opens when it senses a fault and closes back in to test if the fault is still there 2 more times. If the fault remains it will open and stay open. Now if the fault current is big enough, it will open immediately and stay open. The reason it will test the fault is just in case it was a tree branch or something that hit the line then fell off. Without that reclosing ability we would have a ton more outages that we could not explain and a bunch of unhappy customers.

After checking every span of wire and pole we could see from the road and making sure that the downstream reclosure was still closed, it was time to take a hike back into the woods and find out what is going on. You see the reclosure will see faults downstream or beyond it. But the recloser beyond the fault shouldn’t see it.... hopefully. You gotta trust your equipment. So we narrowed it down to a section of line that goes back behind a bunch of trees that you can’t see from the road.

I don’t think this is the cause of the outage... but I am sure some sort of mountain beast had a tasty meal. Elk anyone??

We came across a little flock of turkeys. These dang turkeys are absolutely everywhere in this area. They like to run in front of you on the road then finally fly out of the way. If you look between the trees you can see a few Toms in there with som decently long beards on them.

As we hiked in following the line I noticed this cool looking tree. No bark, no leaves, and it looks to have been in a fire at some point. I had to stop and take a quick shot of it.

Then things got a little funny. You see a few weeks back the crew was going to remove an old dead pine tree next to the line. We stay pretty proactive when it comes to keeping the trees trimmed and the dead trees removed that could cause outages or fires. The crew got called off of the task of removing this old pine tree to handle an outage and they hadn’t made it back up here to remove it. Well the wind did that. It blew the old pine over and into the line. Breaking the neutral and pinning the phase to the ground. Here we go again trying to free up the wire from a heavy tree. Tie a rope to the line and find a good solid tree to tie it off too. This will minimize the “Sling-shot” effect when we cut the tree off the line. I failed to get any photos of this because we were trying really hard to complete this before nightfall. Well that didn’t work out too good. Just as it got dark it was time to get the wire back up and attached to the pole. We had already fixed one span that was broke and now we have another.

As the batteries began to die on my flashlight we had to turn to our phones to provide some sort of light so we aren’t working blind. It’s a decent hike back to the trucks and we are almost done so we just make it happen.

After getting the wire back up, making sure the sag is right and the wires aren’t twisted up, it’s time to head back to the trucks and give these people some lights again.

We were finally able to call it a day around 10:30 pm. As we headed back to the shop part of us was wanting to keep working but another part want to head home and crack a cold one and relax. Let’s just say that beer tasted amazing after a day like this.