Hydro is upgrading the electrical service in our area and today the power is off while they replace a nearby hydro pole.
At about 9:30am the power goes off and the process begins. They go from this…
… to this.
Four houses are directly connected to this pole. Their connections were cut off and a ground crew attached extensions to these connections for re-attachment later in the day. While this was happening the person in the aerial bucket disconnected all the wires from the pole and removed all the various attachments like the transformer and cross bars.
Once everything was disconnected from the pole it was cut into several pieces and lowered to the ground. All this happened while the boom truck was wedged between two garages.
A different boom truck was brought in to place the new pole and a vacuum truck prepped the hole and suctioned away the debris. With the new pole carefully put in place a new transformer is attached and all the lines are re-attached. These lines are all “live” and the one at the top of the pole is the main power wire. I have no idea what the voltage is but it’s a lot. The guy is very careful to keep everything insulated and isolated during the process.
As promised the power went back on shortly after 4pm. the house was starting to get a little cool so we’re very thankful to have everything up and running again. Quite an eye opener to realize just how dependent we are on electricity and how much we just take it for granted. There were so many times we tried to flip on a light switch or were surprises why the fridge was so dark and that we can’t warm up some lunch in the microwave. We had flashlights and of course the phones but the flashlight batteries could use a refresh as they were quite dim.
Sunset was 4:36pm and they did continue working for a while in the twilight. An excellent job and you could tell they were really hustling towards the end to make the 4pm deadline.
Two days later the boom truck is back and it seems like they are re-tensioning all the bolts connecting various parts to the pole. In about an hour they are gone and the job seems complete.