A Day With A Lineman
It has been a while since I have been called out to an outage or since I have written one of my A Day With A Lineman Posts. Things have been nice and quite around the system lately, which is a good thing. Granted it has been nice to enjoy my weekends uninterupted but the extra cash is nice this time of year. I need to replenish the bank account after Christmas and 3 Birthdays..Dang!!
The Weather Couldn’t be much better...
I got called just after chugging my Gut Bomb protein shake, to help another lineman out. He was the first one on the outage and found the problem. He just needed some “Professional” help fixing it :wink:wink Some things we can fix by ourselves but others require a second or even a third guy for safety reasons. I was kind of prepped for this call, since JB had called me 1/2 hour prior, picking my brain a little about this certain section of this circuit he was patrolling. I’m not going to lie I was really hoping for an easy fix that he could do, and I could keep enjoying my Sunday Mornig Chill time.
Cold-Rainy-Breezy....Perfect!
I will just say this, I wasn’t too enthused when my phone rang again. He did end up needing a hand out there to fix the outage.
I have got to get my butt off my comfy couch and leave my warm house to go out in that weather....oh well...
So I head to the shop and check with my partner when I get there to see if I need to pick anything up.
Doesn’t look like the weather is going to clear up anytime soon. Thank God this “should” be a quick fix and we “should” be done before the weather gets any worse....maybe it will get better...shoot the weatherman rarely gets that right how the heck am I suppose to know.
Broken Jumper
There it is... the reason these people don’t have any power. Years of vibrating in the wind have finally taken its toll on this jumper wire and it broke. Now it is just floating freely in the wind.
Since my truck has a winch on the front, I stayed out of the mud to play it safe. No reason to get 2 trucks stuck. Lol. This mud around here turns to some snotty snuff in a hurry and it is super slick. Then you add a 17k pound truck on top of that and it creates some good times messy, frustrating situations.
After JB slipped his truck into position I went down the line to shed some load. This means to open up fuses or switches on the line down stream of where the broken jumper is at or where the line is open. This separates the customers and their transformers from the line we will be energizing. That way when he is placing the new clamp back on line to energize it, he isn’t picking up a bunch of load from customers. This has the possibility of creating some huge arcs and fun times sketchy situations.
While I am running down line, JB makes a new jumper to replace the broken one. Then when I get back we are ready to rock and roll and get these people some power, and I can get back to my comfy couch.
Using hot-cutters he trims chunks of the jumper off to clear it out of the way safely. Then it’s time to install the new jumper with clamps on both sides. This section of line is only 7,200 volts so it is pretty quiet and not too flashy sparkey.
When doing this same thing on 14,400 volts you would be able to see some decent arcing when he was placing that clam. Sorry for the disappointment, I was a little disappointed too so your not alone.
Now all that is left is to make sure he gets the truck out of there and head down line and close the fuses I opened up when I shed load earlier.
I guess my wish did come true, a nice quick fix and the lights are back on. All is well and good once again and electricity has been restored. Time to head back to the shop clean up my boots and head on home.
Here enjoys a stream of water running up the side window of my truck as I was driving home. I’m easily amused if you can’t tell.
Thanks for taking the time to stop by and check out A Day With A Lineman. I just try and give people a little insight on what Lineman do to keep the lights on or restore power from an outage. Some days are crazier than others but that is part of reason why I love my job.
Steem On
and
Happy Sunday
Steemians