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"Really, the goal here is to let folks about the potential hazards that you could
encounter during the winter when trees and wind can conspire to bring down power lines,
and then also to show off some of the excellent
work that all of these lineworkers do each and every
day throughout the winter to bring the power back."
"Here in Western Washington we have about 60 per cent of the outages with the
high wind storms that come through are caused by fallen branches and trees that go over
due to uprooting, or due to the rotness or even just
the fact that even the severe winds have just caused
trees to break. So what we're going to do is we're going to have a little demonstration
to show you what a setup when a power line comes down,
the affects that the power line has as far the
voltage and the danger it presents to the public and to our own workers and show you
how to respond to that."
"What we're trying to get the point across is that you should stay as far away from
a downed line whether you know it's hot or not, you always just assume that it is energized
and you stay a long ways away from it. Now right
at the source here where the wire is laying on the
ground, that could be 14,000 volts or 7,000 volts depending on which system you're in.
But it's putting voltage into the ground. Right here
at the source, the voltage is higher and the farther you
get away from it about every foot or so the voltage actually decreases incrementally as
you get farther away from it. So once again, the farther
away you are from the source, the better you are."
"We have different potential zones of voltage, and I'm going to talk about step
potential. Step potential is when you have one foot in one zone and your opposite foot
in another zone, you now created a circuit going up one
leg and out the other which could be fatal. So if you
catch yourself too close to a downed power line, you want to shuffle your feet slowly
and just take your time and shuffle your feet to get
out of the step potential zone. So I'll demonstrate that.
The wire came down, hit this lane there. I don't want to have my feet far apart. I do
not want to be in the separate zones. So if you find a
power line down, you want to shuffle. So you're going
to shuffle your feet slowly to get out of the zone, and don't pick your feet up. Try
to get at least 20 feet away from that wire before you start
lifting your feet.