power lines

Pj

I am in the process of setting up training for the fire department with the local utility....and I have very definate feelings on this.

The next town over from me one snowy night had a fire. Service line dropped and killed Craig Arnone. A lot of electrical safety classes and utility responses changed after that night.

In my time out in the sticks, I have seen wacker fire chiefs just "have to open up" some podunk road at 0130 on a Monday morning when a tree takes a line down. I'm sorry, but thats a job for DPW and the utility company to handle.

We are not the electric company. We do not string lines, so there is no reason for the fire department to be cutting trees off of them, moving them or testing with a stick or some other f'd up reason.

Its was burned (thankfully not litterally) into a fellow chief's head one day when I was telling him to get the F back, as the reclosures were most likely going to try to re-energize the line. Clueless wants to walk over and start cutting stuff up. About 15sec later, the auto reclosers decided to try to clear a line and a nice spark woke him right up.

Idiots.

And, pulling meters is a mega no-no. In a normal struture fire, chances are the panel (yes, not nessesarly, but usually) will do its job and start tripping circuts or the main breaker. Normal household electrical wiring isn't as much as a problem as it use to be, but yes you still need to be careful in active supression and overhaul.

For those with ladder trucks, its even more dangerous as you have higher voltages to contend with. My captains daughter was a victim of her Capt positioning the bucket too close, and he got killed. She escaped death, but still has some nerve problems and hasn't gone back to work yet (this is well over 6 months ago).

My SOP is on a confirmed fire that utilities are notified to respond at the same time cutting down on travel time.

Tape/cone/protect and do nothing at an electrical emergency. Your not trained or equipped to handle it.

Ben E.

Yeah the auto-reclosers are definately something to be aware of. Most of the units that we serviced in our city were manufactured by GE, and had 3 attempts to reclose before they completely shut down and had to be manually reset by a technician after the outgoing line was repaired.

Although we did run into one recloser one time that had been completely blown up by lightning, but yet was somehow still passing voltage like normal. Who knows what would have happened had the line been damaged and the recloser would have had to attempt it's thing!

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