The TL;DR: Yesterday, our next-door neighbor called to ask if our electricity was also flickering. And did we hear popping on our side of the fence, too?
The underground fireworks were only heard on their side of the fence, but we both turned off our mains and waited for the power company–and, to be safe, the fire department.
Turns out a drop had gone bad. We also learned that our local firefighters have an A+ waxed mustache game.
David S. Wallens said:Turns out a drop had gone bad. We also learned that our local firefighters have an A+ waxed mustache game.
It's almost annoying how good their mustaches are. Maybe I'm not using enough wax...
I thought you were referring to getting out of bed in the morning. Or is that just me?
In reply to bearmtnmartin (Forum Supporter) :
If you're getting out of "bed" underground, something bad may have already happened and you are a zombie.
Last year a similar thing happened at my brother's place. The underground service line burned a strip in his lawn from the pole to the house.
In reply to stuart in mn :
Yeah, the nice man from the power company told us about that happening.
We had a pole fire on the other side of our backyard fence earlier this summer. The embers caught the grass on fire in the backyard but I was able to extinguish it with the hose. The local FD responded and confirmed, yep, the pole was on fire. They had to wait almost 2.5 hours for the utility company to shut the power off. In that time, the pole burned through and dropped the lines, causing the transformer to go all explodey which caught our fence on fire. They were all super cool and yep, their mustache game was on point.
I learned two things that day: One Duke Energy sucks a bowl of phalluses and the other is that having a sweet mustache is a prerequisite to being a firefighter.
So, the big question: Will the power company upgrade my drop before it also goes snap, crackle and pop? The neighbors on the other side have already been through this as well.
David S. Wallens said:So, the big question: Will the power company upgrade my drop before it also goes snap, crackle and pop? The neighbors on the other side have already been through this as well.
Hey, if it ain't broke...
In reply to 1988RedT2 :
That’s what I was afraid of....
In reply to stanger_mussle (Supported by GRM undergarments) :
That's not bad. We had a storm come through and knock live lines down across the road. And they stayed there for 2.5 days because they were power and communication lines and Verizon and west Penn had to argue about who was responsible.
It's ok though, everybody just drove around the road closed signs and over the power lines.
It's not just Florida power companies, tho to be fair.......
My neighbor behind our house does not believe in keeping the backyard up as after all, no one can see it but him - and everyone who's houses border his back fence, but they don't count.
So, we had a pretty good storm blow thru, and one of the branches on his trees fell into the high voltage line killing power to most of the hood momentarily, then fell down into the lower voltage lines and caught fire, eventually burning all the way thru the 6" branch and dropping onto the fiber cables just below, catching them on fire as well - which is where I come into the story.
I have a brandy new 10X16 shed almost directly under said wires and as we watched the fire burn the outer sheathing on the fiber cable, it dripped burning plasticky stuff - the bride was concerned about the new shed so I went out to look - fortunately it wasn't going to drip onto the shed's roof BUT......it continued to burn and of course our Google Fiber was the one on fire.
So, we called the fire dept who responded quickly enough, looked at the burning cable and assumed it was a power cable and said they couldn't touch it till the power company came out and shut off the power. Since our power was still on and a couple hundred thousand people were without power, we were really close to the bottom of the list for getting their attention - and rightly so. I do remember the moustaches tho....
So it burned all night, starting at the point where the burning branch had landed (which had burned all the way thru by now and fallen into my yard) and working it's way towards the power poles. It was still burning at 9 am, the fire dept said they couldn't do anything and I decided that it wasn't an electrocution hazard any more and drug the garden hose to the very back of the yard and gave the cable a quick squirt. Fire is out but of course our cable/internet is down.
It took five days of complaints to get Google to come out and do something (it wasn't just us, 6 or 8 other houses were also without service) and what they did was splice into the cable someplace before where it was burned and string temp cable all over the yards to the various houses. So now my fiber works, but when I mow someone has to lift the cable so I don't mow over it and we have to be careful not to trip on it at night and so on. Google says they don't know when they'll get the burned up cable replaced, could be months or longer!
But, I learned this about power lines - we have poles not buried lines of course - but the very top line is carrying 7,000 volts!, then that powers the cans, which then step down to the 240 that goes to your house, and that is carried on the three lines further down the poles, the phone and cable/fiber lines are below those. The one that burned in my back yard was the lowest one on the poles. And if a tree branch falls onto that top power line, look out! cause that sucker is going to burn/explode/make crazy sparks/blue lights and it won't stop till the short opens again!
We chopped through a 4400 line. Unmarked and not where it should be. CommEd had kiddie cornered through the farmer's field. I'm up close to the boom, watching as we needed to bullseye a manhole structure.
POP!
What was that? Tree roots? Whatever, keep digging.
POP! ....And I watched the Earth glow white. Not 3 seconds earlier, I had my hand on the boom. If I had, I'd have been dead. Nuked.
I now have very healthy respect for electricity.
I watched a couple of cars leap about 20 ft in the air when an underground transformer they were parked just over blew in a downpour in San Diego. It was a very impressive explosion!
And this is why the fire department was called. :)
In reply to Appleseed :
In the union, we called that "spicy dirt".
And comm works were "rainbow roots"
You want to talk about exciting underground pops, this happened locally this weekend. A guy stole a car in Oneida, NY, went on a high-speed chase, lost control of the car and plowed into the house, breaking off a gas line. Police evacuated the house and neighboring houses and got on the horn with National Grid to turn off the gas line. Before National Grid could make that happen, something ignited and leveled the house. Fortunately no one was hit or killed, but I accidentally drove by yesterday afternoon, and the damage was unreal. The house was leveled to the ground, not a single standing wall or pole, and it blew the bark off of the trees and knocked all the windows out of the neighboring houses, peeled off steel roofing. Never seen anything like it myself.
In reply to birdmayne :
I have added some new words to my vocabulary. 
In reply to NickD :
I'm honestly amazed we don't see more gas explosions.
This happened across the street from my previous house while I was out of town. Very little damage - we would never have known if the old poolhouse hadn't disappeared along with all the garbage in the pool. We didn't even have any debris in the yard and our front door was about 60' from the site of the blast.
https://www.nbc11news.com/content/news/Gas-explosion-rocks-Redlands-381336931.html
While this went down, I was playing guitar with a friend–well, actually, I was in the closet pulling out another bass for her.
The amps popped, and she mentioned the lights dimming.
That’s about when our neighbor called.
He usually texts. If he’s calling, I figured that it’s important. And it was.
Once the power was back on, I went back to my office–and there are guitars everywhere. Dang, we made a mess. Totally worth it, though.
In reply to MiniDave :
7,000 volts might actually be low. Stuff 'round these parts is all 12.5kV for distribution, before it steps down to 120/240 for the service lines. Transmission STARTS at 57kV. The big ones you see running across the country will arc well over 20'.
Fun fact: Transmission lines have enough power running through them to energize the lines on the other side of the structure on induction alone, even when both ends of said line are grounded.
Source: I work for a electric utility and have developed a healthy respect for the stuff.
PSA: Stay 50+ feet away from fallen live high-voltage power lines. If you are closer than that, shuffle your feet when you walk. The ground can have different conductance in different places so there can be a voltage difference large enough to kill you between your feet if they are a few feet apart.
We had a tree fall on a power line leading to our house (7.2KV) and knock it down. It was arcing on the ground and started a small brush fire. I got within 10ft or so of it to throw a bucket of water on the brush fire. The first power company guy to show up wouldn't step off the asphalt driveway about 30 ft away and basically told me I was lucky to be alive.
bearmtnmartin (Forum Supporter) said:I thought you were referring to getting out of bed in the morning. Or is that just me?
Out of bed, up from a chair, out of the truck, just walking around. I'm fairly certain my insides aren't fat but bubble wrap.
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