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Originally Posted by lightman
I wonder what they were thinking.In Every substation that I have been in you could hear the 60cycle hum.And you can feel it in the air on humid days.Like we don't turn it off at night,man! Lightman


I have a friend who works for an electricity company over here and the stories tells about this sort of thing is unreal.

For instance, in our sub stations, the high power supply has a remotely resetable "trip"..If a fault is detected, it trips the power off, but once a technician remotely tests the line and everything tests ok, they can reset the trip and restore the power...This can happen three times, and on the third time it trips, they have to leave it off and senda technician to site and to inspect the lines themselves. So the theiving scumbag Pikies who specialise in this, deliberately trip the power three times and then they know its safe to cut the cable..
Personally, I'm all for restoring the power about 20 minutes after the 3rd outage and seeing what we could catch!



Last edited by Pete E; 01/20/10.
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I'm a retired electric utility lineman. From the pictures I would say that the two guys jerked the terminators from the bottom of the switches and didn't realize that this was a riser pole, from the sub-station step down transformer and fed up the pole to a distribution overhead line. When they jerked out the terminators after removing the stand-off brackets for what appears to be PVC conduit, resulting in a tremendous phase to ground and/or phase to phase fault that I'm sure really lit up the sky, not to mention them. I seriously doubt that the bolt cutters were used on the wire. That was the plan no doubt but the only thing they used them for was to cut the bolts on the stand-off bracket. They probably never knew what hit them. Edit: I just looked at the pictures on Snopes and they indeed did cut the wire in the terminator. They had to have had some really good insulating blankets to enable them to make that cut with that voltage. They were lucky to have got as far as they did! Our local rural electric co-op won't even let their lineman work that voltage hot even with 20K rated rubber gloves, booties and sleeves. Hot sticks only or dead and grounded.

Last edited by Sportdog; 01/20/10.
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Originally Posted by BrotherBart
You sound like you are in the phone business Pete...


Yeah, stuck in an office these days though, but spent a while on the repair and installation side, out in the field..Also did a bit in the Army, but that was quite primative stuff compared to civvie street....

Last edited by Pete E; 01/20/10.
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I'm engineer for a power compny, and that's definitely a phase to ground contact of major proportions. The only phone involved in this incident was used to dailed 911.


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Yeah Gringo,If any thinking was done,that was probably it.I was thinking the same thing as Sportdog about this deal,but the pictures don't show very much about the type of construction.Someone mentioned clean-up,I would guess that LE crimescene would bag them.There has been so much copper theft in the last few years,everytime I have a call in a substation I worry about finding a scene like this one. Lightman


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Sportdog, thanks for the details. Like I said, somehow the feeder was pulled down from the pole, and was hot.

It is worth the time to take a look at the snopes photos, one photo shows the cable in full length, you can see the three un burnt wires and a 4th wire with the insulation burned off. In fact, look at the foot of the stretched out dude in the first photo of this thread and you can also see the cable with burnt insulatioon. Looks like the dude steped on it while they were yanking cable out of the ground.

Anyway, as mentioned earlier, this is the best justice, at least they will not be thieving copper anymore!


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I didn't look at the snopes photos yet. I was basing my analysis on the heat shrink sleeve that's in the photos posted. It also looks like about a 900 pair cable and stub. I thought that most power lines were aluminum. I guess stealing copper and aluminum is rampant...


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I have not seen anything, about this on the Dallas area news. Certainly could have missed it, though.

Just saying.

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Just the other day 3 losers decided to see what they could steal from a substation.The 2 saw what happened to the 3rd person when you touch really high voltage lines. I don't think they'll be climbing the fence again.


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