ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade Non-US Electrical Systems & Trades Power failures, U.K.

All Hail, the Liney's involved,no matter where they came from, the Job got done.

Well said! This was an exceptional case; it's rare for anyone here to be without power for more than a few hours at a time.

It's easy to sit indoors (by candlelight!) moaning about the 3 hours it took to reconnect power, but I admire the guys who have to go out to some muddy field in the middle of nowhere and then work by floodlight 30' up a pole on HV with wind and rain beating down on them.

Unrelated to the weather problems, but about 3 weeks ago the major part of my nearest town was without power for 5 hours. That was thanks to contractors hitting an underground cable while doing road works for a new supermarket.

Tell you one thing, Paul, over here, a couple of months ago, it snowed, some places up-country from here recieved 4 foot of the white stuff, people didn't complain, we had a real task changing poles that had snapped off, putting lines back up, I think I actually got 10 hours sleep over the time it took to get everybody up and running again.
Line Mechanics the world over, are sadly under-rated, its really hard yakka, even with hydraulic lifting gear.

I think the disruptions brought into people's lives by the outages just go to show (a) how everybody is so dependent upon electricity to go about their everyday activities, and (b) how the people who bring the power to their lights, TVs, ranges, and electric coffee stirers are taken very much for granted, be they the guys out on the "big wires" or the ones who are called when a breaker in the home keeps tripping.

Have a buddy that's a lineman, and he's given me an interesting realization. If a line crew shows up 2 hours into an outage, customers can be real snippy and demanding. But, if you show up 3 days into an outage [especially wearing snowshoes] they are universally more accommodating.

A little off topic, but here’s a interesting but niche ‘outage’ site… http://www.ecg-llc.com/acointro.html

BJ,
Is that link correct? It's coming up as "not found" from here.

Yes, I'm fairly sure it is, but it might have gotten overloaded. It is a site dedicated to critter-based outages, with {however small} pics. Plan on staying for an hour or so.

BJ,
also tried this site, came up as not found.

Here's the google lookup of the usenet posting...
http://groups.google.com/groups?dq=&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=RuUx9.6165%247F2.4133%40news.bellsouth.net

BJ, I came across this particular site a couple of years ago, it was really cool.
But, I cannot for the life of me, remember what the URL was.
Will do some research.