What happens when lightning hits a power pole ??

one [Music] all right so we just had one heck of a lightning storm blow through lightning hit tree right up here and come across and hit this pole we didn't see the hit we were a couple kilometers down the road but we heard the bang and saw an awful flash in the sky [Applause] so that's all still energized 12 000 volts would have bumped the reclosure a couple times when it hit i'll check that over on the system here after so we do have pull top extensions but it's an easy pull to work on so we'll put in a new pole there opened up the cutout across the street that feeds a communication box there never pop the sideline but she blew the bottom right out of that lightning wrench you can see the lead dangling right there and the fuse is blown before the cruising town starts heading this way we'll try to close in that transformer we might uh might have to replace that too all right so take a look off in the distance that's the pole that had the lightning strike there the tree that was hit right up there get our sideline everything's still intact that's where the lightning arrests are blue now i thought that was pretty well lit getting the cruise geared up head out this way with a pole uh lightning rester cross arm and i noticed this here another transformer open she's blown there so we're two pulls away from the lightning strike and then i seen this now this is pretty wild here so this is what we call a normal open now basically what that means is we get a substation way off in the distance down this way and this is where the feed stops right here those open switches and on the other side of this pole the feed comes from that direction so the two feeds meet right here at this point if there was a large outage on the main road we could actually close in these cut outs and open further down the line to pick up a couple hundred customers in this stretch so i think what we'll do we'll use we'll use our hot sticks and we'll clear the leads off there's no damage to the cross arm or anything on this pole so using the hot sticks i'll get that all clear we'll uh use the hotline cutters clip those leads right off and we'll send a rubber glove truck here next week and we'll also get a tag on the system that identifies the switch is being compromised so that they can see it right from a dispatch if ever they had plans on using it in the next couple days our dispatch will see right away that the switch is no longer any good let's get a closer look here that's pretty wild all right so that is energized 72 volts nothing left of that that's what happens with a lightning strike that completely evaporated all the rubber skirts off that cut out i'm gonna drop my truck and run down the road see see if there's any more damage that's since real high voltage in through this line and uh we can see how far away that other transformer is that took the damage and the next pole which we can't see at the moment definitely going to be getting some flaggers out here this is pretty high traffic on this road and they drive pretty quick this guy's slowing down thank you [Applause] so we had uh with the change of pole two transformers couple lightning resters and a crew went back actually this was about three weeks ago now so a crew has since gone back and replaced the cutout at the normal open uh we had a poll crew set the pole for us and there was uh myself one other truck uh there was one two i had a guy with me an apprentice so there's four of us we had the whole job wrapped up in about two and a half hours it went went pretty quick went uh fairly well so it's it's pretty wild when you show up to these trouble calls sometimes you really have to make sure you look at the whole picture you can you can show up to tree that landed mid-span took out a phase and it might have caused some damage five or six span down the line actually i had a vehicle accident just sunday morning at three a.m and it burned down a phase as it was tripping the aware there was a weak spot at a sleeve it was like 10 span away would have been something super easy to miss so things have been hectic uh falling behind on some editing a little bit i'm heading off to the lake tomorrow so i'm gonna wrap this video up tonight we got some real cool stuff coming up uh milwaukee blades i showed you guys in a video i'm gonna say like six months ago the the hacksaw and i was using that to cut some trees so i got a whole whack of different blades we're going to try out so we're going to take a look at that they're wood cutting metal cutting blades and my dog hears me talking so he's coming downstairs to see what's up uh asides from that guys uh we had a ton of vehicle accidents and copper thefts break-ins at our substations real serious stuff so i am going to share with you guys a few shots of some of the vehicle accidents there was one in particular that the pole was completely broken and the pole itself was energized now our emergency response our first responders police fire paramedics everyone that's unseen have been doing phenomenal as far as working safe around these these incidents and this particular accident we'll take a look at it in a couple weeks when they get a chance to get that up but the cutout and the pole blew and a lot of people see that the cutout's hanging open and assume that the wire is no longer energized or in this case not only was the wire energized but the lead feeding the cutout was in direct contact with the pole and energized the pole and started burning and the occupant of the vehicle crawled out of the van while it was energized it could have been a very bad situation so i want to get some footage up and share with you guys especially any first responders or firefighters that watch this channel some things to look out for in the future so as always guys thanks for checking in hopefully we'll catch up and get i got hours and hours of footage over the last three weeks i'm going to filter through it and hopefully get some stuff out to you guys but until next time drop me a fist bump in the comments work safe and we'll see you next time

Channel: Bobsdecline - Lineman blogger

Views: 32,320

Rating: 4.9744544 out of 5

Keywords: lineman, being a lineman, bobsdecline, lightning hits powerlines, lightning hits power lines, milwaukee tools, milwaukee hackzall, Milwaukee sawzall, becoming a lineman, east coast lineman, lineman universe, lineman show, lineman tricks, lineman tips, lineman reality show, journeyman lineman, lineman life, linelife, milwaukee lineman, powerlines, power lines and lightning, what happens when lightning hits powerlines

Id: jkY8j6vHkQg

Length: 8min 39sec (519 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 15 2021