Here comes the rain… then the Wind… then the rain and wind… Sometimes we get lucky and not a single power outage will happen. We will get 50-60mph winds and nothing… A downpour for hours… nothing. Then comes a decent drizzle of rain and 20mph winds and ring-ring-ring Time to go to work, power is out on the southeast corner of our service territory. Only about 10-12 customers, but there is a lot of powerlines to look at. Not to mention the section of line that goes along the creek bottom and is lined with cottonwood trees on each side. Those damn trees grow super fast, due to being next to the creek, and are brittle as all hell. I sure hope one of them didn’t fall over and tear down a couple poles or something.
I went to the end of the line and started looking at everything back upstream. This included the whole creek bottom. The other lineman started from the circuit breaker that opened and worked my direction. After about 2 hours of wondering around in the dark, we met up in the middle and we didn’t see anything that would have caused the outage. We assumed it to be a branch that had landed on the line and with all the wind it blew off. By this time the rain had stopped and wind was gusting around 20mph. So we closed the breaker in and ta-da it held, power is restored. This was just in time because we had another outage that just came in. Reports of wire on the ground and transformers with blown fuses.
This turned out to be an easy fix, since it was just the neutral on the ground. Yet, we were wondering how the neutral breaking caused 2 fuses to blow on this transformer bank??? Maybe the wire whipped over and made contact with the energized jumpers??? Nope, that’s impossible… then I wondered over to their water well shed and saw a big pile of feathers… hmmm weird?!?!. So I hollered at the other lineman to take a close look and see if he saw any signs of a bird getting in there and blowing things up… Sure enough… poo and a few feathers. Alright!! At least we know what caused this crap to happen.
Fast forward 2 days and it started raining again. It’s been raining since around noon. Yep you guessed it… 11:30pm.. ring-ring-ring Gee let me guess, back out to the southeast end of the system? Sure enough that’s where we are headed again!! This wind is blowing again and it’s raining again… same scenario as before. We know this is really annoying for our customers but it’s really annoying and frustrating for us too. It’s like finding a needle in a haystack sometimes. We have got to find the problem!!
We thoroughly inspect each pole and insulators with a flashlight and binoculars. This is really fun in the rain and wind. Half way through we didn’t find anything. So we opened the line at the half way point and energized the line to that point. It’s holding, the lights are staying on. So that means the problem must be down in the creek bottom somewhere. No branches on the line, the insulators look good… then we got to the 5th to last pole from the end of the line and found 2 insulators that were completely trashed. The pole had burn marks on it from the electricity flashing over the failed insulators.
I don’t know how I missed this before. I’m guessing my focus was on the trees a couple spans away, or I wasn’t quite at the right angle to see the damaged insulators. It’s really tough to see things in the dark while it’s raining… there that’s my excuse. Lol.
2 trashed insulators on the same pole. I’m honestly really surprised that this didn’t start the pole on fire. If it did we probably would have found it the first time. Look at all the black marks from the flashover on those insulators. They took a few shots over the last couple days.
The circuit breaker is called a recloser. When it senses an over current on the line it will open, 3 seconds later it closes back in to test, if the fault is still there it tried it again. If the fault is still there it locks open. Now if the fault is big enough it will open and lock open immediately. So, who knows how many times 14,400 volts flashed over these insulators and went to ground. I just wish I was there to watch the fireworks. Lol
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