Every Winter I am reminded of this story but then every Spring I realize I've never told it.
This is the Legend of the Wobble Pole, a story of an electric power outage during winter. I suppose it could have happened any time of the year but a little snow on the ground added a comedic touch that makes this outage one that I will probably never forget.
I was "on the desk" in distribution operations years ago. I was working an evening shift, it was fairly late in the evening, and I was going about my normal dispatching, a few outages, a few power problems, a normal blue sky day for us in the operations world. Most of the time it's dispatch an outage, close the outage, dispatch the next outage. I don't always get a call from the field workers saying they restored power to a customer but this time I did. It's already getting a bit odd. Those of you who may have had time on the desk or anything adjacent understand you get a sense of rhythm and flow to these things. As soon as something goes even slightly abnormally you are on full alert.
So, why was the field calling me to tell me they restored power? Well, there was a small fuse outage, maybe 5-10 transformers protected by the fuse. Maybe 20-50 customers out. Fairly standard for us. We started at the fuse, went to the end, checked everything, and found nothing. Then arriving at the pole with a fuse we find tire tracks in the snow, a tire mark on the pole that lines up with the tire tracks, and we think: is this really what happened?
Somebody was driving on a snowy road, slid off the road, bumped the pole, which bumped them back onto the road (?), and bumped the fuse open. The fuse wasn't blown, it just fell open. The car bumping the base of the pole must have wobbled the pole just enough that the fuse was able to fall out of the holder. It didn't need replaced. There was no obvious damage to anything. Just a tire mark on the pole. If it hadn't been snowing we might not have even known a vehicle caused the outage. We may have never looked at the base of the pole to find a small black rubber patch.
This is the Legend of the Wobble Pole. A reminder to me and hopefully to you that you really probably have not seen/heard it all. And keep your vehicle on the road, please drive according to conditions, we don't need another Wobble Pole.