Gfret, I be that, if you look closely, you'll find "egg" insulators in the lines that separate the transformer secondaries from one another, meaning that any given house is only supplied by one transformer.
Totally not true around here!!
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We average 7 - 20 houses on a lateral serviced by anything from 2 - 6 pole pigs. My apartment building (5 units) is served by 1 pig (right outside my 2nd story bedroom window - and I thought having a breaker panel in there would be bad...) along with 4 other houses and a few streetlights. Primary voltage is 4Kv, with a 66Kv circuit above.
By the way, a recent flashover in the underground vault a block away had those 66Kv lines dancing a bit!
However, in Beverly Hills and other areas with mansions, it is not uncommon to find one house serviced by an individual pig, or more often, padmount. If you want to talk about some serious available fault currents.....one 55,000 sq. foot location I worked at experienced a short in an air handler motor in the pantry area. (277 volt 3 phase) (no, not a mistype.) The explosion was heard throughout the house!! The breaker tripping in the mechanical room above (through a concrete slab floor) sounded like someone dropped a mini car above us!!
The whole house service was 4,000 amps!! Despite current limiting, series rated breakers throughout, I still saw an in-wall dimmer get literally blown across the room by a shorted light fixture!
Though that TV news footage of secondary overhead feeds literally burning up seems to indicate that they didn't fuse that particular neighborhood. ?
Not necessarily. As seen many times here on this site, and in many accounts of downed/faulted powerlines, arcing faults may not generate enough fault current to blow a fuse, trip a breaker or melt a cable limiter. Especially on overhead lines which fall, the substation breaker may only see a higher-than-normal load, but not above the trip setting.
edited to add some dropped words..
[This message has been edited by mxslick (edited 08-12-2006).]
