ICE STORM March 25, 2009

[Polecat]

Just thought I would share a couple of pictures from an ice storm in Manitoba yesterday. I'm sure many of you are familiar with what rolling ice is but here's a little intro: We've been having some real nice weather and the snow has been melting fairly quickly. Early tuesday morning it started to rain which was really knocking down the snow, to the point where in my yard most of the grass was now showing. Later in the day the temperature began to drop but the rain continued. However as everything metal was becoming frozen the rain was sticking and turning into ice. A powerline that is only a half an inch in diameter can become a couple of inches in diameter. You combine this with a high wind and the lines begin to gallop and break the cross arms, poles and the lines can break due to the tension.

To get the ice of off the powerlines we climb the poles install an aluminum roller on each line and then when each line has a roller installed we pull it down the line to the next pole which has to be climbed and process of moving the rollers to the other side of the cross arm continues. When I finally got home last night I pulled out my snowblower to get rid of the snow drifts in my yard. This morning it's minus 10 outside and it looks like I need to get the snowblower out of the garage again.

Winnipeg, Manitoba is 3 hours north of Fargo, North Dakota. I believe the storm hit them worse than it did us. However the majority of the snow runoff drains into the red river. From what I understand the Red River in Fargo is going to hit it's highest level in over a 100 years.

 

[notacarlo]

That looks incredibly safe.



(i'm sure you guys know what you are doing)

 

[darkred87T]

It looks like they know what they are doing. You know your'e pretty far north when you see treads instead of tires on vehicles.

 

[charlief1]

And everyone wonders why I'm in Texas? We get ice but not like that very often.

 

[onebadsix]

Im a retired power line tree trimmer 27 yrs in the business , we were hit with a ice storm in 1996 , took us 13 days to get everyone back in power and several weeks to repair damage and clean up , most overtime i worked , bought a lot of Buick parts . took a lot out of me , took a couple months to recupe mentally , glad im done with all that work

 

[Polecat]

Safety

These powerlines were de-energized due to the amount of ice build up and the strong winds. Even still the Lineman on the pole has class 2 rubber gloves (good for up to 20,000 volts) on to protect from any accidental energization of the line. Many small and large customer have installed back-up generators that can sometimes back-feed the line and ultimately kill you if you don't take the required safety precautions.

Attached to this is a picture of a cross arm that fell into another line. What happened was the 5/8's galvanized machine bolt through the pole and cross-arm sheared off due to the combined weight of the ice and the galloping of the line. This is really nothing though in many area the ice build can get so severe that towers collapse.