Hey all,
I thought it may be a good idea to state a few ideas for those who do storm chasing and see alot of electrical activity on the network. The types of activity are :
power lines sparking
arcing , large blue sparks, red, whatever colour.
explosions of any type, eg Transformers
HV Power lines hitting together (will trip a whole area)
I work in a Control Room and see literally hundreds, if not thousands of jobs every storm season.
After the major explosion at Dunoon Zone Sub Station, a few interesting topics arose since. This piece of tin roof, or whatever it was, caused a blackout to 3000 people and pretty substantial damage to the Zone Sub.
Without endangering anyone, would be good to see those people who witness such electrical activity , to ring and report it to Country Energy emergency number of 132080. This can save our workers a lot of time in fault finding the cause.
It maybe a simple arc on top of a pole, a high voltage line swinging (causing brownouts), hot joints at night. There are so many to name, every one of these faults can take time to find, if no one reports them to a Electricity Provider, also Energy Australia and Integral Energy in NSW.
If a fault is logged, we can isolate this in many instances and then restore power to most customers, except those normally in outlying rural areas.
We always get calls stating the power is off, the best calls are when a person advises of a major problem. Our systems will alert us to the more important jobs depending on what they see and how the operator logs this. Be mindful, the report still may not get power on immediately, certainly will speed up the process so we can repair. It can take sometime to sectionalise an area to work out a fault, if no one has reported this to us.
If there happens to be anything I have missed, or there are questions to be answered, im only too happy to answer what i can.
All these staff who work out doors, work in ridiculous circumstances , rain, hail, wind, all to keep people happy and restore power as soon as humanly possible.
Hope this is helpful to all those involved.
Dave