the bad thing with burying electric lines is that it becomes more difficult to determine where an outage occurs. A downed line is pretty easy to see. A short underground not so much.

A perfect example of which was the recent downtime at the Seti Lab.

There are some pretty nice tools to find breaks in lines and give you the distance to the break. They have those in the IT world too.

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the bad thing with burying electric lines is that it becomes more difficult to determine where an outage occurs. A downed line is pretty easy to see. A short underground not so much.

A perfect example of which was the recent downtime at the Seti Lab.

There are some pretty nice tools to find breaks in lines and give you the distance to the break. They have those in the IT world too.

They are called crawling technicians?... LOL

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Undergrounding power cables has some great built in logistical challenges. The biggest challenge is all the different utilities competing for placement & position in the trench and at the property lines. In my area (Washington State) natural gas has to be place away from power and then you add two phone companies, three cable companies, one to two water companies, traffic control cables, street light cabling, sewer lines, street drainage, and school fire alarms to that same trench (known as “Joint Buried”) you end up with a ditch that is ten foot wide (typical utility easement width) and about four foot deep. Transmission lines (65kv and up) have to be buried even deeper. Now you take that trench through 5 to 50 plus year old establish landscape with the idea of leaving it as good as or better before we trench through. Big monie$ involved.

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My aunt lost power in a severe storm on Sunday. She got half of it back Wednesday night and the other half midday Thursday. (Oddly, while she was on her generator, she still had cable TV. When the power came back, the cable was out. Comcast is blaming Com Ed.) They might have gotten her back faster, but she lives a few miles from a hospital and they prioritized on getting that back on the grid and off its generators.

The city where I live operates its own electric utility. Most new services installed in the last 30 years (at least) have been underground, but my neighborhood is overhead. Nevertheless, the frequency of outages for me has dropped quite a bit in the last couple of decades. They have been actively upgrading the whole system, including rebuilding substations. There's one substation that doesn't even look like one from the street. There are overhead lines going by in front of it, but I can't say whether they connect to it.

The last major outage we had was years ago, when the Chicago area got 19 inches of rain in one continuous event, and the problem then was that the Com Ed substation feeding into the city's system flooded. A couple years ago, a branch came down on the local feeder lines a couple blocks from me and we were off for 2 hours while they trimmed and repaired.

All that said, I keep leaning more and more toward having a permanent generator installed, with autostart and running on natural gas. I just can't afford it (I think).

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David
Sitting on my butt while others boldly go,
Waiting for a message from a small furry creature from Alpha Centauri.

I cannot complain. I get my electricity from Enel, the state utility, and it is reliable. Milano gets its electricity from a City company (AEM) which gets its juice from the hydroelectric power stations in Valtellina since the beginning of last century. Milano was the first city in the world to have electric lamps in its streets, and the Electrotechnical Association, of which I am a member,was founded in 1896 by Galileo Ferraris.
Tullio

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Undergrounding power cables has some great built in logistical challenges. The biggest challenge is all the different utilities competing for placement & position in the trench and at the property lines. In my area (Washington State) natural gas has to be place away from power and then you add two phone companies, three cable companies, one to two water companies, traffic control cables, street light cabling, sewer lines, street drainage, and school fire alarms to that same trench (known as “Joint Buried”) you end up with a ditch that is ten foot wide (typical utility easement width) and about four foot deep. Transmission lines (65kv and up) have to be buried even deeper. Now you take that trench through 5 to 50 plus year old establish landscape with the idea of leaving it as good as or better before we trench through. Big monie$ involved.

A lot of what you talk about is "political" because companies don't want to share the trench/conduit with other companies. Yes, some of it is technical but most is not. There is absolutely no reason that telco and cable companies cannot share the conduit.

You are 100% right in that BIG money is involved and utility companies would rather pay stock dividends than move to a buried outside plant in existing areas. They will simply wait for urban development to come along and then they can dig as deep and as wide as they want.

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I noticed all the fiber optic lines are buried everywhere Verizon and Sprint because I have seen the manhole covers which identifies them spaced about 1/4 mile apart for each manhole.

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Still thousands without power and I think 35 dead and they shut down the shelters. It got 104-degrees today but it should cool down to about 90-degrees tomorrow. A cold front is blowing through now temps are droping due to shade of clouds and Canadian air it should start to rain soon.

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My rac was picking up until yesterday when the power went out at 4:30 AM for six hours and then again today it went out due to “weather related” a quote from Appalachian Power a bogus lie any way it came back on and some neighborhoods had surges and wiped out all of their appliances when a Comcast cable crossed an AEP power line. The B. S. continues.

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I had a Generac gas generator installed after the last outage here in New England last Oct 30, 2011. We were without power for a week.....and many didn`t get it on for almost 3 weeks.I don`t know if we will ever have an outage like that again.....it was the second one in less than 2 months........but I am dang well ready.

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Still people are still without power in the hundreds if not thousands.

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My aunt lost power in a severe storm on Sunday. She got half of it back Wednesday night and the other half midday Thursday. (Oddly, while she was on her generator, she still had cable TV. When the power came back, the cable was out. Comcast is blaming Com Ed.)

Follow-up, if anyone's interested.

My aunt kept calling Comcast and all they would say was that it would be back by 11:00. They couldn't say if that was AM or PM, or on what day. At least five 11:00s passed before it came back.

At that point, her phone went out. Fortunately, that lasted less than a day.

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David
Sitting on my butt while others boldly go,
Waiting for a message from a small furry creature from Alpha Centauri.

FEMA is in town the damage is in the millions here in town no telling in the whole storm damaged areas over the many affected states. FEMA says my area had the worst damage the FEMA offical saw.

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FEMA declared a federal disaster area now the Governor and the President will follow.

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good luck to every one in the affected areas.

We had a bad power outage here is San Diego county, a line across the dessert shorted out, and pulled down the voltage far enough the nuclear plant shut down, as they wanted to play it safe, and that over loaded everyone else, ever seen a power plant (not a nuclear plant) pop the safety relief valves? no wonder someone though the plant blew up.

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Certainly produces a vast amount of steam, not to mention a lot of noise.
The steam dump was probably not caused directly by the power surge, rather by having the load suddenly removed while the boilers were at high outputs - generally you try to manage steam driven plant in a gentle manner so you ramp demand up and down rather than just turning it all on/off.

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

Certainly produces a vast amount of steam, not to mention a lot of noise.
The steam dump was probably not caused directly by the power surge, rather by having the load suddenly removed while the boilers were at high outputs - generally you try to manage steam driven plant in a gentle manner so you ramp demand up and down rather than just turning it all on/off.

Spot on. I am a certified steam engineer and fireman, working on getting my ASMR boiler inspector stamp. It's amazing how fast they can chafe the firming rates, but going from full load to nothing when you are righ at the pop pressures. And those boilers are BIG, just the left over heat in the metal will raise the water temps enough in a full shut down.

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I've seen and heard a fossil fired steam generating plant drop 440 MW. The steam safety lifted and stayed open for what seemed like forever. Those of us in the switch yard (400+ yards away from the turbine and boiler) knew what had happened to cause the problem. The generator breaker had been inadvertently tripped. The sudden loss of load caused the generator speed up which tripped the overspeed relay which tripped a bunch of other stuff. After we determined what had happened in the switch yard, we went down to the plant. Twenty minutes after the trip had occurred, the operators were assessing the plant status, working at assuring a safe shutdown, and trying to determine what caused the plant to trip offline. Once the cause was known (the inadvertent breaker trip), a restart was planned. The coal mills and coal blowers had shut down when the unit tripped while the induced draft fans and forced draft fans kept running. After about 30 minutes of purging the boiler of gasses and coal dust by the fans, the operators began the boiler re-light procedure. Since the plant was hot, getting back up to power levels with stable plant operation took only an hour or two after the boiler was lit.

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I've seen and heard a fossil fired steam generating plant drop 440 MW. The steam safety lifted and stayed open for what seemed like forever. Those of us in the switch yard (400+ yards away from the turbine and boiler) knew what had happened to cause the problem. The generator breaker had been inadvertently tripped. The sudden loss of load caused the generator speed up which tripped the overspeed relay which tripped a bunch of other stuff. After we determined what had happened in the switch yard, we went down to the plant. Twenty minutes after the trip had occurred, the operators were assessing the plant status, working at assuring a safe shutdown, and trying to determine what caused the plant to trip offline. Once the cause was known (the inadvertent breaker trip), a restart was planned. The coal mills and coal blowers had shut down when the unit tripped while the induced draft fans and forced draft fans kept running. After about 30 minutes of purging the boiler of gasses and coal dust by the fans, the operators began the boiler re-light procedure. Since the plant was hot, getting back up to power levels with stable plant operation took only an hour or two after the boiler was lit.

Pretty impressive when they pop. Only difference the plants out here. Ant power every thing, so when the lines from Arizona went down we had overloads and safety shutdowns.

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FEMA declared a federal disaster area now the Governor and the President will follow.

FEMA usually waits for disasters to arrive before they make a declaration.

Was it professional courtesy in this case?

Now all you need to make the Katrina-like nightmare complete is for the Red Cross to show-up and start shaking-down local merchants whose businesses were already hammered.