I got Smart Metered Today

Nothing else is. Transformers sitting on (or under) the ground are pretty susceptible to flooding. Once you have flooding, severe erosion isn't at all uncommon. A little wire isn't going to hold back a flood.

That's pretty local and cheaply replaced. The worker pays.

Now take that water and move it across the ground at 20MPH.

It still amazes me how you lefty Europeons are so much smarter than the people who do this stuff for a living. You're just like Eeyore.

Ours is pretty bad. Third-world bad, but you'd expect it since the city runs the system. It's not uncommon for there to be an outage every day. It's rare, this time of year, for the power to go a week with no outage. Fortunately the outages are usually only a few minutes.

Just like Chinese Christmas tree lights. ;-)

In the UK the transformers are always sealed - usually filled with cooling oil, or special arc quenching gas if the housing also contains circuit breakers.

The cable entry glands on the (relatively) low voltage local substation are bound & tarred for a fully watertight seal.

Usually any cables 33kV or less are underground, they're sealed, insulated & armoured.

We do of course have the national Grid 400kV overhead cable pylons, we have pylons carrying cables as low as 135kV for outlying communities and industrialised farms.

Pole pigs are a rarity except in sparsely populated rural areas, the distribution voltage is pretty low and from a distance the poles/cables don't look much different from telegraph poles.

You don't. You use dynamite to blast holes in the rock, and set the poles. The poles are marked, R.I.P., for "Replace, In Place" to let a line crew know that they can't simply drill a new hole next to a damaged or undersized pole.

Not very long - they stick a load of little concrete posts in the ground above the cable, each concrete post has a metal information plate stating gas, electricity, water or whatever + any other info roadworkers/engineers might need.

Funny thing though - they don't get damaged everytime someone drives an overheight truck through town.

You are pretty much stupid.

That would be a charge back to the company that damaged the wire.

I've seen underground electric service for a mall fail because heavy wind blew enough snow through the vents that it melted & filled the conduits.

It is here, as well. The outages are from drunks shearing off the power poles, or hurricanes which would flood underground electrical distribution in most of Florida.

I *highly* doubt they're watertight to 10', or more.

It *can* be done. HV lines under water can be done. The point is that it is

*expensive*. It doesn't pay, for most applications. Where the lines are underground it's primarily for aesthetic reasons, not practical.

Sure, the higher the voltage the cost goes up substantially. Even some of these HV lines are buried, it's just insanely expensive and isn't often worth the expense. I know of one that went under a lake, instead of over it because the poles were taken out by ice one year. The state forced them to submerge the replacements. Again, it wasn't a cost analysis, at all.

The point is that almost the whole country is "sparsely populated", by your standards. Those places that aren't (and even many that are), generally have new installations put underground.

The issues are *well* understood by everyone in the business.

I have never heard of that happening in the US.

Its cheaper in the long run when you take into account redneck/hillbilly crane drivers ploughing through a towns overhead cables and yanking all the pole pigs off their poles.

Nearly every cop chase TV show has at least one meth head chopping down a power pole with a stolen car.

We even have as many as possible of our very few pole pigs within fenced off areas - and we don't even have that many meth heads.

The nearest 400kV national grid transformer to me is just beyond the outskirts of the estate where I live, and on the highest ground in town - in fact the whole town would be submerged by the time water was lapping at the transformer foundations.

By which time, there would be "crush-depth" issues in the next town along.

Oh yeah.. that happens so often that it validates the extra cost. NOT. It is not cheaper and never has been.

What a retarded aggrandizing, lying dork you are. I doubt you could find even one. And cars and power poles and chopping off do not mix without 90+ mph collision events, and the car is STOPPED after that and the pole is usually NOT "chopped". I know this because I have seen it up close. And it also usually takes a Cadillac sized car to do it.

You also have a wholly bent perception of reality.

Maybe more frequent is meth heads chopping down power poles with stolen cars - we get a lot of American cop chase TV shows over here.

Apparently the Aussies have similar power pole problems - but at least they build theirs stronger.

So you're saying that you know more than the engineers who do this stuff for a living?

...even where there are underground utilities.

No, you give them heroin, instead.

Perzactly.

Do you have any idea just how many power poles there are in the US, and what miniscule number are taken out by criminals?

Stronger than prestressed concrete or 1-3/4" wall thick steel pipe that's 36" in diameter?

The Aussies tend to use 2 poles & crossbar - you pretty much have to take out both poles to bring it down.

You must have *SERIOUSLY* shoddy engineering if meth heads can drive stolen cars into your underground utilities!!!

Certainly a lot more than we have bears & other furry animals getting fried on our underground cables.

And our overhead cables are mostly too high up for vandals to do any serious damage with an air rifle.

I wouldn't mind seeing how the costs tally up for the fleet of helicopters to inspect those overhead cables we do have, in some areas they have to use larger helicopters carrying water tanks and jet wash compressors to clean the bird shit off the insulators.

Somewhere down the line there has to be a break point where it would have been cheaper in the long run to bury even the highest voltage cables.

They aren't meant to be car killers.

Why didn't her insurance pay it?