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Faunsdale, AL | Local jr college was not in session when there was a storm coming, so the state used their facilities to stage line crews ahead of the storm. It’s a Military school with ROTC and the students board there, so they have barracks and dining hall etc.
I think normally they just put the crews up in motels around the staging area until the storm has passed and it’s time to move in, but in this case, the state owns the college so they just used it.
As David said above, they don’t plan to be in the path of the storm. They have to make their way in afterwards. Local utilities will be on the ground first, surveying damage, making plans and rebuilding what they can as the outside teams are working toward them.
In a small scale, I always figure if I can take a tractor or loader and clear the county road through my area, that speeds of the process of restoring power. The linesmen don’t have to waste their time cutting their way into my area. I can’t normally do anything much to help repair the lines but I can get trees out of the road. And we need the roads open anyway.
When things get really bad (Hurricane Ivan most recently) and there aren’t any line crews available we usually wind up checking power line right of ways that are not along roads and removing trees etc. The mass of out of state crews coming in was not the case back 20 years ago, so you might be out quite a while before there was anyone available but a guy in a pickup with a hot stick!
After Fredrick in 1979 we could only get someone first thing in the morning or late in the evening because they were spending the day elsewhere working on worse hit areas of their territory. Had one branch line that we had inspected that looked good, and had the power co guy come try turning back on a couple times. Each time fuse would blow or he would pull it before it did. He didn’t have time to do any more than that, so we kept looking for the problem.
Finally somebody noticed an old service drop that had been just 3 single wires swung across the county road to an old house nobody lived in. Instead of the normal twisted triplex aluminum we were used to seeing, it had just the single insulated wires to feed probably a 60 amp service. Well something took the wires down across the road in the storm and then someone drove through at speed and broke/threw the wires back up into the fence row. We had been driving past them for several days without noticing them. Neighbor climbed up a ladder and snipped them off at the transformer and that evening when they closed the switch it held!
That was back in the Wild West compared to how it is now.
Edited by ccjersey 10/8/2024 15:27
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Got a Text From my Son
