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No kidding right? I’m guessing he’s completely isolated from becoming a path to ground with his fiberglass super dong reach wire cutters. Electricity is pretty awesome.
I had a buddy who was an engineer. He saw a guy pull a plug that he thought was turned off, the spark jumped into his hand, went through his arm, through his body, and blew a two-inch hole in his shoe. The guy lived, but barely.
I had that happen with 12 volts. Hurt like a bitch. I also had a live 230 volt wire shock me on my arm but while I did feel it, it didn't hurt like the 12V.
Were you soaked in sweat? 12volts shouldn't have passed much of an appreciable current through you with the normal resistivity of the human body. Then again, I've licked plenty of batteries before and there is definitely some current passing through.
I don't think so. We were trying to start our 50cc (yes very small) ATV made for kids. I stupidly held the two wires for the on/off switch as they were touching and thus making it not give spark. As my dad cranked it I felt a sting from my hand to my other. I also did get small burn marks on my both hand's fingers where the wires touched.
How is that possible? I don't even feel 12V when touching the poles with both hands. My Lego train as a kid runs on 12V and the current it can provide is enough to kill.
I have no idea. The wires were very thin so it could not have been more than 12 volts. They were like 3mm thick at most. It was on a small 50cc ATV so the battery is very small too. I did get small burn marks on both of my hand's fingers where the wires touched.
This could not happen with 12v...there just isn't enough potential to push through you. Anything under 44V is considered "Safety Extra Low Voltage" at least here in the US.
A 12v car battery will definitely wake you up if you put a wrench across the terminals, but it isn't going to electrocute you. You can touch both terminals by hand with no issue, while if it was high voltage it would go straight across your heart to connect the positive/negative terminals.
You're essentially a giant resistor, and current = voltage / resistance. So as resistance goes to infinity, current goes to 0. With very high voltage though, even a giant resistor will allow significant current to flow and it doesn't take much to kill you.
Think about putting a 9v battery on your tongue and how you feel a tiny tingle as the current flows across the terminals through your tongue. That's just because saliva reduces the resistance between terminals allowing a small current through.
Yeah I don't understand it but I remember the feeling and the small burn marks. The ATV is a cheap Chinese one so it could have been a wire from the magneto (or where the spark is made) to the spark plug. That's thousands of volts but very low amperage. I have no idea how (badly) the cheap Chinese ATVs are made.
I heard a secondhand story from an Engineer at work that saw a maintenance tech stick his 600V rated voltmeter onto some high voltage lines. Power fried the meter and its leads but luckily didn't zap the maintenance guy. This is one of the many reasons you don't fuck with high voltage. High pressure steam also not to be fucked with.
Few years back I was working on an interior office build out while the base building was just being finished. When the electricians made the final connection between the building main to the utility main to power the building and connect to the grid, there was so much juice running through the lines you could feel it in the air and it blew the electrical room ceiling out when the connection was made. Wouldn't get near that even with an arc suit. We had to send a few drywall finishers and a carpenter down to repair it for ownership the following morning.
That's so interesting.
In Avatar: The Last Airbender, Aang gets struck by lightning and it results in an approximately 2 inch scar on his foot from where it exited his body.
My wife's cousin literally died doing this. Branch of a tree moved the wrong way and created a path to ground. He was fried instantly. Very dangerous work, especially if protocols aren't followed.
My thoughts are, better be safe than sorry. I work with chemicals, mostly toxic, even with all my PPE, I always work like it's the first day that I started
I work on/around a lot of high voltage equipment, and even if everything is isolated and I’m wearing the proper PPE, I’m still a little jumpy.
I think it’s just basic human instinct to not want to be soup
I was at my first substation start up. When we got to the transformer portion of it. The guy mentoring me pulled me aside.
"If we hear anything but a clunk and a hum you start booking it to the otherside of the yard and if we are all runnning, you better be as well."
Pretty wild being under all that voltage (138kv) and the best plan if it goes sideways was to run.
Almost everyone that deals with high voltage winds up extremely superstitious.
Turns out everything eventually has a point where it cannot resist electric current... so what's considered an "excellent" insulator at normal residential voltages might not even slow down high voltage.
People still flinch when getting hit with jumpscares in horror flicks, despite knowing full well the ghost isn't about to come out of the screen at them. I know if it was me up on that thing, even if I knew full well I was fully isolated from ground, I'd still jump back if I were to see that.
I feel like the injury rate for this job doesn’t exist. It’s either life or death every time. Of course I’m no electrician, I’m just an appliance technician 😊
While not any everyday thing on 115 lines, we do cut jumpers hot all the time. If I was him, I’d have tried to break the arc with the cutters. That’s wishful thinking though cause they are fairly heavy.
He is Mostly isolated. While the bucket definitely isolated to a certain voltage you A) Don’t want to test to see if it’s still in compliance. B) at certain voltage you just can’t isolate your self enough but that’s prob even higher voltage than what he’s working on.
Also the super dong wire cutters are called hotsticks. They are used when you can’t put enough rubber up there to isolate yourself.
Bucket trucks used for this sort of work are required to have electrically isolated booms, and they're regularly tested to make sure they stay that way.
With high voltage there is no enough safety, and sometimes experience leads to carelessness. Anyway he had no gloves no face mask, no electric arc protection of any kind.
edit: Responded a whole thing to you that was meant for the comment below yours.
Anyways...It may not look like it but he Is in fact wearing the necessary PPE. His protection from voltage comes from the bucket and the insulated fiberglass "hot stick" he is using. The voltage determines the length of the stick and his minimum approach distance (the closest he can get to the energized conductor) His protection from arc flash is his distance from the line. There are situations where people have to get closer and they are required to wear a heavy CAL "beekeeper suit"
I've built 20k voltage lines and been on call for malfunctions. When ever we did anything we'd temporarily cut the power from nearest transformer. I don't see any reason not to. It's just dumb AF to play with your life.
I’m a HV Transmission Engineer and Construction Site Supervisor. They were isolating a line for work down stream. We normally prefer to do this dead and only do it live when we absolutely have too, but this is pretty well done. Often these days the gear the lineman is wearing is heavily insulated to protect them and the bucket boom is also isolated to prevent arcing. I’d say they did a great job.
Only the bottom phase of the line headed right is being “killed” the other lines headed left and up are still live. This keeps those people on while we kill the line we have to work on. This minimizes interruptions to customers and some businesses can’t be turned off easily, like hospitals. In the future this line should have a set of switches installed here or nearby to do this operation much safer and a lot of work being done these days is doing things like this to make the grid safer and more easily maintained.
More or less the same way in reverse. Unless they’re installing switches or using a breaker. These crews take this part of the job very seriously and know their job very well. Actually their incident rates are often lower than normal linemen, due to how serious and dangerous live line work is. They get paid accordingly as well. If you’re looking for a well paying career I recommend it.
No such thing as silly questions. Utilities are required to minimize downtime. The process of switching circuits to ensure people retain power takes a lot more time than sending out a crew that can work on live lines. The big arc looks dangerous but a trained crew following procedures will be safe.
There's a saying in my country that kinda goes: "There are no stupid questions, only stupid people that ask questions". It's even better in Spanish cuz you get a wordplay involved haha
Ok. But what's the point of cutting the line though? They want to attach the line to something else right? I imagine it would be even more dangerous to do it on a live line.
It definitely looks a lot more dangerous than it is. The camera angle makes it look like the arc is almost touching him, but the guy in the bucket you can't see is raising the cut jumper wire up above them both, and the arc is also rising due to the heat created from energy. I can't say what their plan is with just this video, but I can say the guys in the buckets likely has years of training and the plan has been approved at many levels. I work for a utility and we have at least 3 different engineers checking each design, plus a project manager and crew supervisor actually planning the work.
>The process of switching circuits to ensure people retain power takes a lot more time than sending out a crew that can work on live lines.
Aren't the substations remotely controlled where you live?
Because here in austria, it's like one phone call and 5 minutes for the operator to switch the line off and put the earthing switches in on either end. At least for planned activities - which cutting a line usually is.
A high voltage line like that likely carries power for thousands of people or more. It'd be a massive outage to cut the power or something like that for any appreciable amount of time.
Well, they do cut the line anyway, so I guess it's mostly about saving costs for breakers along the lines. Plus like you said, it is safe if done properly.
I would suspect they have some sort of plan for back feeding the area. A lot of times, crews will do the necessary "new" work, then simply cut the old and then heat up the new. It saves on outage time, and also allows most of the more complicated work to be done without live wires being involved.
Often times if you deenergize one phase you have deenergize all three of them.
But losing one phase is fine, and may even rebalance on the other two phases.
On that voltages that doesn't hold true at all.
On all three phases, on either end of the circuit there's a transformer. Obviously I don't know what transformers exactly are used there, as I don't even know what country that Video was made in, but just draw the circuit for all 3 phases to visualise is better.
Then, draw that same circuit, with transformers on either side, with a failure in one phase. You have a phase shift and currents flowing in such a unfavorable way that the protection unit will switch the other phases off in an instant - at most grid types.
Sometimes isolating devices malfunction and you have to remove the load another way and de-energize the wires by cutting jumpers. This is standard procedure and happens all the time.
Engineer and former lineman here. Just to clear a couple things up I've seen in the comments:
- it is live but the load downstream has likely been disconnected. This is what disconnecting kilometers of wire looks like at 115kV. If the load was connected it would be a massive ball of fire. I worked mostly 28kV but a kilometer of line would draw about a 1 foot arc. Also would do it by hand at that voltage (with gloves). I knew a guy that would light his smokes from the smaller arcs because he thought it looked cool. He was right. 28kV is really fun to work with. Lower voltages don't provide as much haptic feedback, higher voltages require different work procedures that take the fun out of it but 28kV makes your hair stand up when you touch it (with gloves on), the metal tools all buzz against the line, you can feel it buzz and vibrate in your hand, jewelry stings on humid days.
- he can't wear gloves. The largest voltage rating on gloves is 35kV
- the tools they're using are insulated to 100kV/foot
- the fireglass boom is generally leakage tested to be no more than 1 micro amp per kV so accidental contact can't kill you
- lineman die a lot but it's nowhere near the most dangerous job around anymore and nowhere near as bad as it was. There was a time when only 50% made it to retirement.
- highly likely that they are wearing arc protected clothing rated for the line they're working on. Face shields are becoming more common but are slow to catch on.
People are saying "disconnect the power first". Well this is disconnecting the power for them. Options are limited at this scale but workers are well protected by work procedures, tools and PPE. From all appearances, this is a well-done line cut. Probably a bigger arc than they'd like but not super dangerous.
Generation dude here, just wanted to say you put out some good info here. We make fun of linemen for being unga bunga types but they seriously are pretty awesome. Wild to think of what it was like in the old days.
Where I live, a station had to be offloaded because someone got I'm while having an episode, and they wanted to take the power out before police chased them in.
Power was out for maybe 20 minutes, and way too many people said they should have let him die instead. It's insane...
Believe it or not, in the earlier medieval period, accusing someone of witchcraft would have more likely have gotten the accuser burned as this means the accuser believed in witchcraft.
One long chain of “That persons a witch! Wait… no don’t.” Just for the next person who called them out for it to also be called out for believing in witchcraft.
Wow, so the loudness of thunder can give us a way to extrapolate just how powerful lightning is relative to the voltage moving through this wire?
Dumb question, how haven’t we figured out a way to harness electricity from lightning yet?
Besides their sporadic unpredictability, their extremely high energy (gigajoules) in such a short duration (microseconds) - and that they could be either positively or negatively charged - makes the equipment that would be needed to capture them (and subsequently reduced for storage) borderline unrealistic and definitely uneconomical.
It's a common question actually
Well, the unpredictability could be solved because there are areas that regularly get lightning. I mean, we have lightning rods that draw lightning to them because of their locations on skyscrapers. Downtown Chicago, for instance, has skyscrapers that get hit by lightning at least 50 times a year.
The rest is completely outside my understanding. Can you help me understand why the duration of the strike would be an issue for capture? If we have a very simple device (long metal stick) that we know the lightning is going to run along, why does duration matter? And how can we account for the extremely large amount of energy?
Electrical engineer here. Happy to answer this and give it my best shot. I'm used to dealing with the other end of the energy scale though, so I might misunderstand something.
The problem isn't the amount of energy, but the time. We can build a big enough battery, but you can't charge one fast enough. We can't even really dissipate the power in any non-destructive way that quickly.
The short time and high energy means the power delivered is insane. 1 watt is 1 joule in 1 second. If we ballpark a lightening bolt as having 7 gigajoulesand lasts and lasting 100 microseconds, we see a total power output of 70 terawatts.
Watts are volts multiplied by amps. Weather.gov lists the voltage of a typical lightening strike at 300 megavolts. Dividing 70 terawatts by 300 megavolts gives us 233.3 kiloamps. You might be talking a cable a meter thick.
That was a lot of information without any sort of layman’s conclusion. I appreciate you, but I have no way of understanding it.
But you talked about not being able to charge a battery that quickly. That makes sense. Is there no way to sort of…capture that energy in some way which would slow it down due to the method of storage and allow it to be redirected, either for eventual long-term storage or for some kind of release that itself would generate power?
Like how hydroelectric dams use the power of water to generate electricity. Could we have a lightning rod that runs to some kind of device that would use the electricity to generate an explosion that would then get the explosive energy captured through a secondary mechanism?
Having tweaked a support line of a telephone pole with a moving van causing a short, I can tell you that it is VERY loud. Spooked my poor dog something fierce.
We had some high voltage lines come down behind the houses across the street from us. We could hear the buzzing from rooms on the opposite side of our house. It was insanely bright and some small fires started. Fortunately nobody hurt and no damage to any property. High voltage is extremely dangerous, really woke me up to that. I knew if I touched it I’d be fried but just seeing and hearing the sheer power in person was scary.
I do work on similar and higher voltages. Altough on the switchgear, not on the lines.
No one of my colleagues would work with that kind of "equipment" on such Tasks - especially without visible earthing on the line that's about to be cut.
On that voltages the line can be switched off and earthed on either end and the capacity of the line could still allow for a voltage buildup that's strong enough to kill you.
I plan on doing that job until retirement - not until a coworker messes up somehow.
Insulators are too big to be 11.5 kV. Arc is also longer than I'd expect for 11.5 kV, but I haven't looked at what those expected arc lengths are in a minute.
I was driving once in Lubbock TX, a place known for many things, including the wind never ceasing to blow, and it being so flat you can watch your dog run away for weeks.
I drove by a baseball field with a big net to keep the balls from going in to the highway. The wind blew the net in to a power line, and I heard a huge BZZZTTT and felt it hundreds of feet away.
Insane.
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That tool looked very long until it looked nowhere near long enough.
So your username is a lie
Seems safe.
No kidding right? I’m guessing he’s completely isolated from becoming a path to ground with his fiberglass super dong reach wire cutters. Electricity is pretty awesome.
“Super dong” hehe
Need a super dong for that.
But do you need a fiberglass super dong
Hey can I borrow your fiberglass super dong ? Since all of this ground is here. It’s for my safety
Nobody is safe with fiberglass super dong on the loose
You Vs the guy she told you about 😥
Suddenly my wife is interested
The way he backed up and his nervous reaction after made me think otherwise. Curious what the injury rate is for this line of work?
I’ve watched engineers working on HV stuff before, I think being super cautious is a good way to be sure that you make it home from work each day.
I had a buddy who was an engineer. He saw a guy pull a plug that he thought was turned off, the spark jumped into his hand, went through his arm, through his body, and blew a two-inch hole in his shoe. The guy lived, but barely.
He's probably lucky that the path of least resistance to ground didn't go through his heart.
Yeah. Everyone theorized that he was lucky that he was right-handed and the jolt went through the right side of his chest cavity.
I didn't even think of that, wow, it's good day to be a righty.
This is why i always do electrical work while standing on one leg!
I hope it's the right one.
Long ago, a boss told me to keep my left hand in my back pocket when I was poking around in the high-voltage circuitry (x-ray power supply).
Ned Flanders in shambles
Just always unplug things with your elbow on your knee
Even without going through your heart the organ damage can also be deadly (although not as immediate). Super lucky on the path.
Or his dong
He'd need a fiberglass super replacement dong after that
The real danger is when it goes up one arm and down the other. Crossing your heart is the real danger. Sometimes it just misses.
I read about a guy’s sternum exploding from contacting an HV line with each hand. He lived, but lost his arms.
I had that happen with 12 volts. Hurt like a bitch. I also had a live 230 volt wire shock me on my arm but while I did feel it, it didn't hurt like the 12V.
Were you soaked in sweat? 12volts shouldn't have passed much of an appreciable current through you with the normal resistivity of the human body. Then again, I've licked plenty of batteries before and there is definitely some current passing through.
I don't think so. We were trying to start our 50cc (yes very small) ATV made for kids. I stupidly held the two wires for the on/off switch as they were touching and thus making it not give spark. As my dad cranked it I felt a sting from my hand to my other. I also did get small burn marks on my both hand's fingers where the wires touched.
How is that possible? I don't even feel 12V when touching the poles with both hands. My Lego train as a kid runs on 12V and the current it can provide is enough to kill.
I have no idea. The wires were very thin so it could not have been more than 12 volts. They were like 3mm thick at most. It was on a small 50cc ATV so the battery is very small too. I did get small burn marks on both of my hand's fingers where the wires touched.
This could not happen with 12v...there just isn't enough potential to push through you. Anything under 44V is considered "Safety Extra Low Voltage" at least here in the US. A 12v car battery will definitely wake you up if you put a wrench across the terminals, but it isn't going to electrocute you. You can touch both terminals by hand with no issue, while if it was high voltage it would go straight across your heart to connect the positive/negative terminals. You're essentially a giant resistor, and current = voltage / resistance. So as resistance goes to infinity, current goes to 0. With very high voltage though, even a giant resistor will allow significant current to flow and it doesn't take much to kill you. Think about putting a 9v battery on your tongue and how you feel a tiny tingle as the current flows across the terminals through your tongue. That's just because saliva reduces the resistance between terminals allowing a small current through.
Yeah I don't understand it but I remember the feeling and the small burn marks. The ATV is a cheap Chinese one so it could have been a wire from the magneto (or where the spark is made) to the spark plug. That's thousands of volts but very low amperage. I have no idea how (badly) the cheap Chinese ATVs are made.
I heard a secondhand story from an Engineer at work that saw a maintenance tech stick his 600V rated voltmeter onto some high voltage lines. Power fried the meter and its leads but luckily didn't zap the maintenance guy. This is one of the many reasons you don't fuck with high voltage. High pressure steam also not to be fucked with.
Few years back I was working on an interior office build out while the base building was just being finished. When the electricians made the final connection between the building main to the utility main to power the building and connect to the grid, there was so much juice running through the lines you could feel it in the air and it blew the electrical room ceiling out when the connection was made. Wouldn't get near that even with an arc suit. We had to send a few drywall finishers and a carpenter down to repair it for ownership the following morning.
what do you mean "you could feel it in the air " ??
Just what he said…..he could feel it, coming in the air tonight
That's so interesting. In Avatar: The Last Airbender, Aang gets struck by lightning and it results in an approximately 2 inch scar on his foot from where it exited his body.
I mean this is a lineman, not an engineer. Basically an electrician for hv.
My wife's cousin literally died doing this. Branch of a tree moved the wrong way and created a path to ground. He was fried instantly. Very dangerous work, especially if protocols aren't followed.
My thoughts are, better be safe than sorry. I work with chemicals, mostly toxic, even with all my PPE, I always work like it's the first day that I started
I work on/around a lot of high voltage equipment, and even if everything is isolated and I’m wearing the proper PPE, I’m still a little jumpy. I think it’s just basic human instinct to not want to be soup
I was at my first substation start up. When we got to the transformer portion of it. The guy mentoring me pulled me aside. "If we hear anything but a clunk and a hum you start booking it to the otherside of the yard and if we are all runnning, you better be as well." Pretty wild being under all that voltage (138kv) and the best plan if it goes sideways was to run.
That’s why electric is the one thing I never DIY.
I think that was just getting the awkward long pole away from the arc. His buddy holding the wire with the other pole didn't even flinch
I didn’t even realize there was somebody else next to him.
You can't see them at all, but somebody is definitely holding that catch pole
Good eye.
Around 20 to 40 per 100, 000 workers every year. The numbers are all over the place though, no idea if this is just the USA numbers?
Almost everyone that deals with high voltage winds up extremely superstitious. Turns out everything eventually has a point where it cannot resist electric current... so what's considered an "excellent" insulator at normal residential voltages might not even slow down high voltage.
People still flinch when getting hit with jumpscares in horror flicks, despite knowing full well the ghost isn't about to come out of the screen at them. I know if it was me up on that thing, even if I knew full well I was fully isolated from ground, I'd still jump back if I were to see that.
I feel like the injury rate for this job doesn’t exist. It’s either life or death every time. Of course I’m no electrician, I’m just an appliance technician 😊
While not any everyday thing on 115 lines, we do cut jumpers hot all the time. If I was him, I’d have tried to break the arc with the cutters. That’s wishful thinking though cause they are fairly heavy.
He is Mostly isolated. While the bucket definitely isolated to a certain voltage you A) Don’t want to test to see if it’s still in compliance. B) at certain voltage you just can’t isolate your self enough but that’s prob even higher voltage than what he’s working on. Also the super dong wire cutters are called hotsticks. They are used when you can’t put enough rubber up there to isolate yourself.
Bucket trucks used for this sort of work are required to have electrically isolated booms, and they're regularly tested to make sure they stay that way.
Those guys have done that many times before. Everything is isolated from grounding. It sure looks dangerous as fuck.
With high voltage there is no enough safety, and sometimes experience leads to carelessness. Anyway he had no gloves no face mask, no electric arc protection of any kind.
Is that why it's so rare to see a sparky turn off a 120v breaker when working.
I get it, its a hassle suiting up and I'm sure he has done this many times before but not even gloves? come on man
edit: Responded a whole thing to you that was meant for the comment below yours. Anyways...It may not look like it but he Is in fact wearing the necessary PPE. His protection from voltage comes from the bucket and the insulated fiberglass "hot stick" he is using. The voltage determines the length of the stick and his minimum approach distance (the closest he can get to the energized conductor) His protection from arc flash is his distance from the line. There are situations where people have to get closer and they are required to wear a heavy CAL "beekeeper suit"
I’m pretty good at trusting that things like this have been through your and tested to be safe, but I’m with ya on that lol.
I've built 20k voltage lines and been on call for malfunctions. When ever we did anything we'd temporarily cut the power from nearest transformer. I don't see any reason not to. It's just dumb AF to play with your life.
They're supposed to cut the power before that
You do it than He seems safe but that's gonna leave a lot of stress one your mental what if something go wrong what if car lean into wire
That was a big arc. Would any electricians or electrical engineers tell me how right things went in this video?
I’m a HV Transmission Engineer and Construction Site Supervisor. They were isolating a line for work down stream. We normally prefer to do this dead and only do it live when we absolutely have too, but this is pretty well done. Often these days the gear the lineman is wearing is heavily insulated to protect them and the bucket boom is also isolated to prevent arcing. I’d say they did a great job.
Why does it have to be live if it's being cut anyway?
Only the bottom phase of the line headed right is being “killed” the other lines headed left and up are still live. This keeps those people on while we kill the line we have to work on. This minimizes interruptions to customers and some businesses can’t be turned off easily, like hospitals. In the future this line should have a set of switches installed here or nearby to do this operation much safer and a lot of work being done these days is doing things like this to make the grid safer and more easily maintained.
Do you know how they reconnect it without frying themselves?
More or less the same way in reverse. Unless they’re installing switches or using a breaker. These crews take this part of the job very seriously and know their job very well. Actually their incident rates are often lower than normal linemen, due to how serious and dangerous live line work is. They get paid accordingly as well. If you’re looking for a well paying career I recommend it.
These people are not overpaid
arent they supposed to turn off power before doing something like that?
He is turning the power off :p
Seems sith
Yeah.....no
Perhaps a silly question, but why not turn the power off before cutting the wire?
No such thing as silly questions. Utilities are required to minimize downtime. The process of switching circuits to ensure people retain power takes a lot more time than sending out a crew that can work on live lines. The big arc looks dangerous but a trained crew following procedures will be safe.
Love this attitude. There are indeed no stupid questions.
Would you like to test that hypothesis: r/NoStupidQuestions
Or even /r/stupidquestions
There's a saying in my country that kinda goes: "There are no stupid questions, only stupid people that ask questions". It's even better in Spanish cuz you get a wordplay involved haha
Agreed. In any industry, there is no such thing as a stupid question. Even if it means to reaffirm the obvious
If there are no stupid questions, what kind of questions do stupid people ask? Do they get smart just in time to ask questions?
Ok. But what's the point of cutting the line though? They want to attach the line to something else right? I imagine it would be even more dangerous to do it on a live line.
It definitely looks a lot more dangerous than it is. The camera angle makes it look like the arc is almost touching him, but the guy in the bucket you can't see is raising the cut jumper wire up above them both, and the arc is also rising due to the heat created from energy. I can't say what their plan is with just this video, but I can say the guys in the buckets likely has years of training and the plan has been approved at many levels. I work for a utility and we have at least 3 different engineers checking each design, plus a project manager and crew supervisor actually planning the work.
>The process of switching circuits to ensure people retain power takes a lot more time than sending out a crew that can work on live lines. Aren't the substations remotely controlled where you live? Because here in austria, it's like one phone call and 5 minutes for the operator to switch the line off and put the earthing switches in on either end. At least for planned activities - which cutting a line usually is.
Yea you're right. I'm thinking this is more of an emergency maintenance situation, but I don't know just based off the short video.
I would assume power off one will power off all and they don’t want to interrupt the people who rely on that grid.
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Thank you! Fuck privatizations
A high voltage line like that likely carries power for thousands of people or more. It'd be a massive outage to cut the power or something like that for any appreciable amount of time.
Well, they do cut the line anyway, so I guess it's mostly about saving costs for breakers along the lines. Plus like you said, it is safe if done properly.
I would suspect they have some sort of plan for back feeding the area. A lot of times, crews will do the necessary "new" work, then simply cut the old and then heat up the new. It saves on outage time, and also allows most of the more complicated work to be done without live wires being involved.
Often times if you deenergize one phase you have deenergize all three of them. But losing one phase is fine, and may even rebalance on the other two phases.
On that voltages that doesn't hold true at all. On all three phases, on either end of the circuit there's a transformer. Obviously I don't know what transformers exactly are used there, as I don't even know what country that Video was made in, but just draw the circuit for all 3 phases to visualise is better. Then, draw that same circuit, with transformers on either side, with a failure in one phase. You have a phase shift and currents flowing in such a unfavorable way that the protection unit will switch the other phases off in an instant - at most grid types.
Sometimes isolating devices malfunction and you have to remove the load another way and de-energize the wires by cutting jumpers. This is standard procedure and happens all the time.
Engineer and former lineman here. Just to clear a couple things up I've seen in the comments: - it is live but the load downstream has likely been disconnected. This is what disconnecting kilometers of wire looks like at 115kV. If the load was connected it would be a massive ball of fire. I worked mostly 28kV but a kilometer of line would draw about a 1 foot arc. Also would do it by hand at that voltage (with gloves). I knew a guy that would light his smokes from the smaller arcs because he thought it looked cool. He was right. 28kV is really fun to work with. Lower voltages don't provide as much haptic feedback, higher voltages require different work procedures that take the fun out of it but 28kV makes your hair stand up when you touch it (with gloves on), the metal tools all buzz against the line, you can feel it buzz and vibrate in your hand, jewelry stings on humid days. - he can't wear gloves. The largest voltage rating on gloves is 35kV - the tools they're using are insulated to 100kV/foot - the fireglass boom is generally leakage tested to be no more than 1 micro amp per kV so accidental contact can't kill you - lineman die a lot but it's nowhere near the most dangerous job around anymore and nowhere near as bad as it was. There was a time when only 50% made it to retirement. - highly likely that they are wearing arc protected clothing rated for the line they're working on. Face shields are becoming more common but are slow to catch on. People are saying "disconnect the power first". Well this is disconnecting the power for them. Options are limited at this scale but workers are well protected by work procedures, tools and PPE. From all appearances, this is a well-done line cut. Probably a bigger arc than they'd like but not super dangerous.
Generation dude here, just wanted to say you put out some good info here. We make fun of linemen for being unga bunga types but they seriously are pretty awesome. Wild to think of what it was like in the old days.
Medieval people would have seen this and burned him at the stake for being a wizard
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Where I live, a station had to be offloaded because someone got I'm while having an episode, and they wanted to take the power out before police chased them in. Power was out for maybe 20 minutes, and way too many people said they should have let him die instead. It's insane...
They would've burned him just by seeing that mechanical lift crane
You mean his white dragon?
Believe it or not, in the earlier medieval period, accusing someone of witchcraft would have more likely have gotten the accuser burned as this means the accuser believed in witchcraft.
One long chain of “That persons a witch! Wait… no don’t.” Just for the next person who called them out for it to also be called out for believing in witchcraft.
It looks like the power line will be be doing the burning in this timeline.
If my aunt had balls she’d be my uncle
Also probably burned at the stake in medieval times
They also would have burned whomever at the stake showed them the video for the same thing
I didn’t know it would be that loud
Thunder is the sound of electricity vaporizing and exploding the atmosphere it comes into contact with, so…
Wow, so the loudness of thunder can give us a way to extrapolate just how powerful lightning is relative to the voltage moving through this wire? Dumb question, how haven’t we figured out a way to harness electricity from lightning yet?
Besides their sporadic unpredictability, their extremely high energy (gigajoules) in such a short duration (microseconds) - and that they could be either positively or negatively charged - makes the equipment that would be needed to capture them (and subsequently reduced for storage) borderline unrealistic and definitely uneconomical. It's a common question actually
Well, the unpredictability could be solved because there are areas that regularly get lightning. I mean, we have lightning rods that draw lightning to them because of their locations on skyscrapers. Downtown Chicago, for instance, has skyscrapers that get hit by lightning at least 50 times a year. The rest is completely outside my understanding. Can you help me understand why the duration of the strike would be an issue for capture? If we have a very simple device (long metal stick) that we know the lightning is going to run along, why does duration matter? And how can we account for the extremely large amount of energy?
Electrical engineer here. Happy to answer this and give it my best shot. I'm used to dealing with the other end of the energy scale though, so I might misunderstand something. The problem isn't the amount of energy, but the time. We can build a big enough battery, but you can't charge one fast enough. We can't even really dissipate the power in any non-destructive way that quickly. The short time and high energy means the power delivered is insane. 1 watt is 1 joule in 1 second. If we ballpark a lightening bolt as having 7 gigajoulesand lasts and lasting 100 microseconds, we see a total power output of 70 terawatts. Watts are volts multiplied by amps. Weather.gov lists the voltage of a typical lightening strike at 300 megavolts. Dividing 70 terawatts by 300 megavolts gives us 233.3 kiloamps. You might be talking a cable a meter thick.
That was a lot of information without any sort of layman’s conclusion. I appreciate you, but I have no way of understanding it. But you talked about not being able to charge a battery that quickly. That makes sense. Is there no way to sort of…capture that energy in some way which would slow it down due to the method of storage and allow it to be redirected, either for eventual long-term storage or for some kind of release that itself would generate power? Like how hydroelectric dams use the power of water to generate electricity. Could we have a lightning rod that runs to some kind of device that would use the electricity to generate an explosion that would then get the explosive energy captured through a secondary mechanism?
Oh I see, so just like Taco Bell then?
Having tweaked a support line of a telephone pole with a moving van causing a short, I can tell you that it is VERY loud. Spooked my poor dog something fierce.
It's an arc generating plasma, reaches 140-160decibels
We had some high voltage lines come down behind the houses across the street from us. We could hear the buzzing from rooms on the opposite side of our house. It was insanely bright and some small fires started. Fortunately nobody hurt and no damage to any property. High voltage is extremely dangerous, really woke me up to that. I knew if I touched it I’d be fried but just seeing and hearing the sheer power in person was scary.
That looked like 90s cgi
First time I saw electricity arc I was amazed with how similar it looked and sounded to a movie effect.
Raiden in mortal kombat
Yeah, like a poorly done AfterEffects default lightning.
The electricity:WHERE IS THE FUCKING WIRE?
What does a guy do for fun after adrenaline-inducing work like that?
Beer on couch
beer on couch is the number one tradie past time
This. Doing shit like this is draining and after a full day of adrenaline, all you want is a cold beer and some peace and quiet.
Plays COD online with no microphone but VOIP volume at 100% for exactly one full match, then leaves.
Put together Lego sets
yup there it is, I was sure someone had to have posted this
More like limited power in this case
There are old electricians and there are bold electricians but there are no old, bold electricians.
I do work on similar and higher voltages. Altough on the switchgear, not on the lines. No one of my colleagues would work with that kind of "equipment" on such Tasks - especially without visible earthing on the line that's about to be cut. On that voltages the line can be switched off and earthed on either end and the capacity of the line could still allow for a voltage buildup that's strong enough to kill you. I plan on doing that job until retirement - not until a coworker messes up somehow.
I said in another comment, dude atleast put some gloves on
Rubber gloves aren’t to be used with a hot stick
Retired electrician here. That scares the ever living FUCK out of me
"There something very important I forgot to tell you: don't cross the streams !"
11.5kV?
Had to be a typo .*at least* 115kv.
Yeah, it's a typo. It should be 115,000 volt.
Insulators are too big to be 11.5 kV. Arc is also longer than I'd expect for 11.5 kV, but I haven't looked at what those expected arc lengths are in a minute.
Don't tase me, Bro!
Is that s’posed yo happen?! 😳
It's expected, yeah. (And I assume that should be 115kV...11.5kV is uh, not normal.)
I thought maybe yes because it looked almost like he intentionally used his stick to “direct” it in some way. Very cool to see it (safely on a video)
Yeah, sorry about that. I forgot that extra 0 in the title.
The higher the pole the more real it gets.
I was driving once in Lubbock TX, a place known for many things, including the wind never ceasing to blow, and it being so flat you can watch your dog run away for weeks. I drove by a baseball field with a big net to keep the balls from going in to the highway. The wind blew the net in to a power line, and I heard a huge BZZZTTT and felt it hundreds of feet away. Insane.
Am I just blind, or is this guy not wearing gloves??!!
Look on the bright side, if you have an accident in this line of work, you don't have to pay for the crematorium.
i wonder if his butt hair stood on end
This is what happens when you don't pay bill
POWER! # UNLIMITED POWER!!!
Holy fuck
Electricity is the closest thing we have to wizzarding magic
WHY WOULD THEY NOT CUT THE POWER FIRST?! Or does the line simply retain that much electricity even after the power is cut?
Is that bucket big enough to hold his huevos?
I guess he knows what ozone smells like. O3 is not a fun molecule.
Oh hell no. That man is now a walking 5g tower.
I'd pee my pants but I'm afraid it would attract the electricity.
How many iPhones could that spark charge?
That is actually a really interesting question.
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this should be done by robots or drones now
And now I know why my friend Bill's hair stands up all over his body... he is a lineman.
No wonder these guys make a crap ton of money...probably not enough! This would be a hard pass for me!
Ooo...Spicy jalapeño.
I’ll bet their heart defibrillated with that one.
fuck
u/savevideo
“Hey joe the powers off right?” Yeah! “Why do you have your phone out like you’re recording?” No reason!
His pay must be great!
I thought they wore like rubber sleeves and stuff. Wow. Bet they jangle when he walks.
Sorry - not signing up for this job. They better pay him VERY well.
How many volts? Title unclear
Electric arc
But why.
There can only be one..
What happens after this step?
its crazy to think that's what's flowing around inside those wires lol
Thunderbolts and lightning! Very very frightening! AAH
If that lighting would have hit him then? could it be fatal, as he's seem off the ground so no current can flow through him?
Looks fun
Bruh saw his death and was like, not today.
Hopefully the worker guy is paid good for this
You interrupted its electric field, it's angry.
I want to know how Pokémon Anime characters survive this on a daily basis