Pole fire causes another GT power cut
CUC pole on fire, file photo
(CNS): Parts of the capital are without power again this morning after a pole fire in the industrial area of George Town caused an electricity outage, CUC have said. Customers on Red Gate Road, Dorcy Drive, Industrial Park, the airport and other areas, as well as along Sparky Drive where the fire occurred, have had their supply cut. The outage started some time after 10am and CUC said crews were working to restore the electricity supply, which would take about two hours.
“CUC regrets the inconvenience caused to customers affected by this outage,” a release from the company stated.
This is the second outage this week. CUC customers in West Bay, George Town and Bodden Town were without power for more than an hour on Tuesday morning as a result of a “temporary loss of generation”, CUC said at the time.
Category: Local News
@Unna Look Ya , you gave a good explanation of how the electrical fire’s starts, but I don’t think that it should be the responsibility of the public to report anything to CUC , because of the responsibility / maintenance CUC should do ,and the money they charge the consumer , and the profits they make . Maybe if CUC offered the public a reward for reporting the need for maintenance..
In the USA where salt spray is a problem to the electric wires the power company usually do poles and wires inspection / maintenance regularly per year . They do have a transformer blow ,but no fire’s on the poles that I have seen or heard off.
CNS did CUC give you the headline “pole fire causes another GT power cut ” the poles do not cause power cuts or fires, it is what that is connected to the poles that causes the fire.
Well we have heard some “explosion” sound coming from CUC direction and we are down again at approx 1:20pm. If it’s a pole it was LOUD for a pole.
I have heard a lot of poles sizzling late like they need wash them because of salt deposits….Expect more soon if this is not dealt with hastely.
This is what happens when you have a monopoly in the service , you can charge what you want , do maintenance when you want , say what caused the problem when you want . I wonder how old are the transformers ?
They seriously need some competition, this is becoming way too regular. Its Friday lunchtime and ATM’s are not working, Fosters are only accepting cash as their Card machines are down. Traffic is backed up all over Industrial Park. We pay too much for the service to be this poor. Come on CUC, get you act together!! Your customers deserve better!
The outage was caused by a pole fire, which no doubt was unavoidable and unplanned. Any fair minded person would understand that every now and then things happen.
More now than then, 2pm and the road is still closed. It was opened for around an hour and closed again
Looks like poor maintenance to me.
Pole fires are caused by salt buildup without a good rain to wash it off. It can be prevented by thermal imaging to identify hot spots on the lines and preventative washing. This is something that CUC used to do.
Anonymous “26/02/2016 at 2:45 pm” you made a wrong assumption giving an excuse for CUC, saying that these pole fires are “unavoidable”. Pole fires ARE AVOIDABLE if CUC would only do the necessary maintenance in a short enough interval that keeps the insulators clean enough to keep working as electrical insulation at high voltages. When CUC leaves it too long between washings of insulators in vulnerable areas, they allow hazards to develop; pole fires (plus electrocution hazards) and power outages will eventually result.
It is unfortunate that CUC apparently has taken to giving vague or no detailed explanation as to what is causing these problems. For most of these pole fires, given the limited information that has been made available from CUC here is my “most-likely” explanation of what is happening.
The large ceramic posts that keep CUC’s transmission and distribution wires from coming in contact with their poles, are insulators. If the surfaces of the insulators are clean, they provide electrical insulation that isolate the high voltages in the wires from contacting or energizing the poles.
There is nowhere in Cayman that is far from the sea so from time to time there is a significant amount of saline mist (“salt spray”) in the air. A fine layer of salt spray reaching the insulators will evaporate, leaving behind a film of salts on the insulators; as this continues to happen the film becomes thicker and electrically conductive because salt adsorbs water from the air around it. Also, vehicles driving on the roads kick up a very fine layer of “road grime”, a fine dust comprised mainly of carbon and carbon compounds (coming from rubber tires and the asphalt used to build roads), and when that reaches the insulators it creates conductive carbon films on the insulators. Typically one or both of these film deposit phenomena are occurring on CUC’s insulators over time. The insulators are designed so that occasional rains should wash most of those deposits away, but over a period of time in certain areas of the island or in “dry season” the accumulation of these films on the insulators can happen faster than the rains can wash them away.
That sort of insulation breakdown is not a failure of the insulation material. It is an inadequacy of the maintenance protocols of the company maintaining the electricity transmission and distribution network that our country pays for dearly. In Grand Cayman, that company is CUC.
So especially in those vulnerable areas, and certainly on poles where the “sizzling” sound can be heard, if CUC leaves the insulators unwashed for long enough there will eventually be a dangerous breakdown in the insulation effect as these films begin to conduct electrical current with the symptoms of “sizzling”, sparking and sputtering which generates a large amount of heat (and flashes of light, and radio noise):
[current in Amperes] X [voltage in Volts] = [power generated in Watts]
For example a “short-circuit” as small as only 1 Amp arcing across an insulator carrying a 13 kV primary distribution wire generates 13 kW of electrical power in the form of faint flashes of light (often visible at night especially), a bit of sound (the “sizzling” another blogger mentioned), and a whole lot of heat pretty much equivalent to having thirteen 1000 Watt hairdryers blowing on and around that part of the pole where the insulator attaches.
The insulation breakdown can allow so much “short circuit” current to pass that it causes so much heat that it can cause the wooden poles to catch fire. And by the way, in those circumstances part or all of the pole can become energized by very high voltages which presents a very dangerous risk of electrocution if anyone happens to touch the pole. And if the pole becomes energized, there is a risk that the guy wires become energized too. In other words, there are “catastrophes waiting to happen” so long as CUC does not prevent these insulation breakdowns from happening.
Therefore these pole fires (and associated electrocution hazards) that have become much too frequent occurrences ARE avoidable if CUC will only invest in the man-hours to properly check and maintain its transmission and distribution network infrastructure.
And now a suggestion:
CUC should promote use of its hotline for members of the public that see sparking or hear sizzling on poles, to immediately report it to them so they can quickly dispatch a crew to attend to the problem before it causes yet another unplanned (but avoidable!) outage. CUC has put a pole number on all (or at least most of) their poles – in several cases using numbered pegs that look like galvanized nails – so a member of the public seeing such a thing can give CUC a precise reference for exactly which pole has a problem. “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!”
Most of the traffic problems are due to the police not being bothered to put officers at the non functioning traffic lights to control traffic.