OOPS..someone forgot to mark out the utilities...

[Birken Vogt]

Somewhere I read that they trucked generators to the island, two of them didn't run and the other ones couldn't hook to the electrical grid because they had the wrong hook ups. Okay- found the article, I was wrong on numbers , but it seems they had troubles hooking them up. Shouldn't be that hard to hook up some jumpers?

Well it is more than just jumpers but with this kind of power if 4/9 were not able to be hooked up right away then either they hired the wrong rental company or somebody at the utility needs to be re-educated.

Maybe it was the same guy who marked out the cables.

Or maybe the news got that story wrong as well.

 

[Shimmy1]

..The one question I have is, the equipment used to pound or drill in the posts, is it protected from electrical shock( electrocution ) just in case what happened happens? noone was hurt this time, but was it just dumb luck or were there safety measures in place? unrelated, but the same question with horizontal drilling, are the machines insulated or grounded to prevent human fatalities if a power line is hit?..

Electricity takes the shortest path to ground. In this case, the end of the casing as it went through the cable. Same goes for a horizontal drill. An excavator or backhoe would be capable of being dangerous to someone in close proximity to it, since the bucket could pull the cable up out of the dirt, and leave the tracks or stabilizers (and possibly a bystander) as a potential.

 

[Hobbytime]

Electricity takes the shortest path to ground. In this case, the end of the casing as it went through the cable. Same goes for a horizontal drill. An excavator or backhoe would be capable of being dangerous to someone in close proximity to it, since the bucket could pull the cable up out of the dirt, and leave the tracks or stabilizers (and possibly a bystander) as a potential.

I knew that first part..I would just think for added protection there was some device or protective gear that would protect the operator in case they hit electric and it didnt ground out at point of contact..

 

[Delmer]

Like what? a GFCI sensor tied back to the nearest substation? If the operator is in a cab they're relatively safe. The "boots on the ground" are the ones in danger, not too much that can be done to protect them, besides keeping they're feet together and don't touch anything.

 

[Birken Vogt]

Most of the time, a line of this class will have a ring of grounded shield conductors around the live conductor in the center so it will ground itself out and short to itself and trip the protection before current flows elsewhere. But when you are talking about power of this magnitude, even a little bit of leakage that didn't get trapped can still be deadly.

Look at it another way, 120 volts can be deadly but if a little leakage led to 1/10th of that being touched that would be 12 volts and not generally hazardous. However if this is a 69,000 volt line, or more probably a 138,000 volt line then a tenth or even a hundredth of that would still kill you quite dead.