re: Interesting graphic on number of power poles damaged by Ida compared with other hurricanes

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I do a lot of work with plant extension and upgrade. I know there’s a lot of damaged poles. What I’m talking about is they’re just replacing poles with little damage. I’ve check some poles that was bent a little bit, came back later, and it was replaced with a brand new pole

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I’m surprised this is your attitude. If it’s bent or minimally cracked now, yeah , that probably wasn’t their first priority, but the integrity of the pole is still compromised. With each successive storm, (hurricane or not) and just time, those small issues will get worse, and worse.

Material is down here now. Crews are down here now. The most major infrastructure is replaced, now it’s triage. Make the fix now while the money and material is here to avoid making it later.

If you are gunshot, and also have a laceration that’s not critical, you operate on the gunshot wound first. Once you have that stabilized, and don’t have another gunshot victim in the next bay, you don’t just forget about the laceration. You go back and do the easy stitch up once you have the major issue addressed, or if you have a junior doctor free who can stitch up lacerations but doesn’t have training in fixing bullet wounds.

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That's a lot of poles.

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Aggy board.

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Not feasible at all. Not for distribution lines. Wires run on the poles are not insulated. That is by design. If cables are put in the ground they would have to increase the size of the cables and drop the voltage that they are carrying on them. Which then would increase the power needed to generate enough power. And that’s not including the shitload of new transformers that would need to be installed. One other thing. Finding a fault in a buried cable is challenging to pinpoint while you can see where the problem is with above ground lines. Like I said. It is really not feasible to even contemplate doing this. Outage times would triple if not more when the power goes out. I have spent plenty of hours inside manholes making splices on new cables that had to be replaced

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It’s possible, just expensive. And the O&M difference is negligible. I jus did a pull plan for a 325 mile 345kV dual line. All buried.

As far as finding issues. You bury a fiber line with it and the line is spliced in vaults. You can actually ID issues pretty well between vaults which is only about 3000’.

But you’re looking at $8-12M per mile in an urban environment with a mixture of HDD and open trench.

Entergy started trimming trees in Southdowns last week.

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I wish they would consider different poles like concrete since some of the same poles were just replaced after Zeta.

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Just so happens that class B (12" Max diameter) timber piles/poles are in very short supply. I saw a newly replaced 25' pole that just didn't look right. I kinda assumed a class 5 (8" Max) would be closer to expected for that height. It looked so damn big I pulled over and put my tape on it and sure enough it was a class A (14" Max). I have a feeling that's gonna happen on a lot of the poles as well.

It could probably take a decent hit from a vehicle and stay up but limbs will still take out the lines.

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But you’re looking at $8-12M per mile in an urban environment with a mixture of HDD and open trench.

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That's just the transmission side. There's also thousands of miles of distribution lines and thousands of distribution transformers.

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That’s a crazy number to fathom compared to Laura. The entire western part of the state was wrecked by Laura. Every single pole on my road was broken for Laura.

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A lot of Laura’s distribution damage was counted with the transmission poles destroyed since the distribution was under built on those structures

Are these only Entergy owned or all poles combined?

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Not feasible at all. Not for distribution lines. Wires run on the poles are not insulated. That is by design. If cables are put in the ground they would have to increase the size of the cables and drop the voltage that they are carrying on them. Which then would increase the power needed to generate enough power. And that’s not including the shitload of new transformers that would need to be installed. One other thing. Finding a fault in a buried cable is challenging to pinpoint while you can see where the problem is with above ground lines. Like I said. It is really not feasible to even contemplate doing this. Outage times would triple if not more when the power goes out. I have spent plenty of hours inside manholes making splices on new cables that had to be replaced

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Ive also read that ground water would be a huge problem, leaking into the lines. Then at that point, as someone pointed out, it would be a nightmare determining where the problem is. Simply not feasible for may reasons to include also astronomical costs.

Your post had me LMAO…