Cable spiking
- Thread starter Andy™
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Jaysus!
Mans got balls, big balls!
Mans got balls, big balls!
Naaah, I'm too attached to my eyebrows.
Did you watch the rest of the video? I can never decide if it's a good or bad idea for me to watch stuff like that.
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yep, watched all of it. at least you get to watch someone else get it wrong so you know what happens if you do...
phil d
Well-known member
I got a flashover once, the day we were going on holiday, I was only in work for half a day, I felt really daft, walking around North Wales with no eyebrows, no hair on one arm and a suntan that looked like I'd spent a week under a sunbed.
Mind you I remember getting called out to one job when I was a supervisor, one of the lads had hit a cable feeding a street lamp, "there was one hell of a bang and a flash but it's dead now" he assured me, before I could stop him he'd climbed back into the hole, another bang, unfortunately there wasn't a lot I could do for him, whilst I carried lots of spares on my vehicle, underwear wasn't one of them.
He got a right telling off from me, he'd not use a CAT and to make matters worse there was a strip of new tarmac from where he'd dug right to a new lighting column, it was obvious there was a cable there, he never made that mistake again, lesson learned.
It's very rare that they are dead after a hit, most are on a 400A fuse, and that takes some blowing!
Mind you I remember getting called out to one job when I was a supervisor, one of the lads had hit a cable feeding a street lamp, "there was one hell of a bang and a flash but it's dead now" he assured me, before I could stop him he'd climbed back into the hole, another bang, unfortunately there wasn't a lot I could do for him, whilst I carried lots of spares on my vehicle, underwear wasn't one of them.
He got a right telling off from me, he'd not use a CAT and to make matters worse there was a strip of new tarmac from where he'd dug right to a new lighting column, it was obvious there was a cable there, he never made that mistake again, lesson learned.
It's very rare that they are dead after a hit, most are on a 400A fuse, and that takes some blowing!
most new ones are connected directly to DNO these days, however there are still many with a private cable between a group of lights with a 25 or 32a LST fuse from the one that has a DNO supply
I get to hear a lot of stories from groundworkers about cables they've hit in the past. Every now and again someone will tell me that they've "hit one, and it went bang and we thought it was dead but then it went again and again" and what they've hit is a HV cable on a bit of network that's got auto reclose on it. Luckily they have had the sense not to get in the hole to have a closer look at the damage.
phil d
Well-known member
I knew a lad that hit a 132Kv cable with a spade once, he was very lucky, he'd caught it a glancing blow and it started to "bleed", fortunately he wrapped Denso tape around it to stop it and rang the networks people. It was right outside a filling station and caused chaos, they closed the road and evacuated the filling station, as there could have been a nasty explosion. It turned out that the digging prints he'd been given had been copied the wrong way around, mirror image, and the pipe they were looking for was actually on the other side of the road, they'd used a CAT but for some reason it, hadn't picked it up. they'd dug the hole and not found the pipe, so they were squaring it off by hand thinking it may have been on the edge of the excavation when they hit the cable, it was one of the main feeders into town and they ended up replacing a long length of it, I can't remember the cost but it was into many many thousands of pounds, something to do with the oil that had bled out of the cable, apparently under little or no load it's normally a thick grease but when it gets warm it melts and helps cool the cable.
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