Power Outage Explained
Thursday, March 21, 2013 @ 4:48 PM
Prince George, B.C. – A B.C. Hydro spokesman has identified the problem that caused a power outage in the Heritage area this morning.
Hydro’s Bob Gammer says a person was doing some digging in their back yard “and hit something underground.” The incident occurred around 9:45 a.m. and knocked out power to homes south of Tabor Boulevard, north of Explorer Crescent, east of Bauch Avenue and west of Gordon Crescent. Power was restored at about 1pm.
Gammer says the person who hit the “something” was not injured.
Comments
Are the power cables in that area below ground? And are they close enough to the surface that somebody digging in his yard can damage them?
Natural gas lines are like 6 inches or less sometimes in private yards, I dug one up accidentally changing sod, took a few minutes to realize what it was.
Think Hydro is min 24 inches for underground service below final grade. Hydro usually has a ribbon buried a few inches above the conduit as a warning except older services. This was most likely private service but being on the transformer side there would be no protective breaker. They are also usually in plastic conduit – you need a ditch witch or backhoe to damage them that badly to break the insulation on the wires and cause a short. 600 volt commercial service and we may have been reading a obit.
The fellow digging was really blessed.
All gammer a hydro spokesman can come up with, hit something. Wow.
Its a little early for digging in 3 feet of snow and frozen ground.
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