Topic: Safety - Live Power Lines - Witness Damage to Network

[David Carroll]

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

[Gambit]

A very worthwhile post Dave, I wasn't aware of or didn't think to ever report anything if I saw it. I will in future now do so.

Thanks

Mat

[Jimmy Deguara]

This topic stemmed from my video of the tornadic debris exploding the transformer on the 26th October 2007 in Dunoon. Two requests followed including this one by David.

I must say I also had not idea that in this day of high technology they cannot tell where all faults are. My apologies for not reporting it but I will try in the future.

Regards,

Jimmy Deguara

[striker92]

im happy to say that my fathr has always taught me, being an electrical enthusiast, that anything that seems unusual on a powerline probably is, ive seen glowing wires and an exploding transformer befor and reported them and generally the response has been fast, just remember that telling the spark monkeys about something that turns out to be harmless is much better then spending the night under candlelight.
cheers, mark