Work in progress

[Doug Kerr]

This shot was taken in 2006, but it got trapped, and came to the surface today while I was looking for something else.

It records a situation that existed for many months in East Dallas.

Douglas A. Kerr: Joint pole - work in process​

This is a joint pole, meaning that it carries "plant" of two or more entities, here (a) the telephone company (that is, the incumbent local exchange carrier), (b) the power company (that is the electric energy delivery utility; the sale of electric energy is competitive in Dallas), and (c) the cable TV provider. This pole was evidently owned by the electric energy delivery utility (that is common - usually their "stuff" is the biggest, and highest).

The original pole had been hit by a car and injured severely, so it had to be replaced ("subbed" - derives from "instituted") Apparently when the electric delivery company (or its utility contractor) came to do the work, the telephone company had not yet come to mechanically detach all their facilities from the old pole. This included a subscriber line ("loop") cable ("figure eight type", with an integral suspension strand, supported at the pole by a "three-bolt clamp") and a number of subscriber service ("drop") wires going from a terminal on the cable to various homes (each anchored with a wedge tension clamp hooked to a hook on the pole).

So the workers just sawed off that portion of the old pole and put a rope line on the suspension strand to support the cable from a fitting on the new pole - "temporarily".

Somehow the follow-up didn't happen (this had been in place at east six months before I got around to shooting it in 2006, and it still hadn't happened by late 2007 just before we moved from Dallas).

But apparently the terminal cover was inadvertently opened during the process and left open, and some birds moved in.

Ah, the wonders of utility deregulation. It just ain't the same any more!

Best regards,

Doug

 

[Asher Kelman]

This shot was taken in 2006, but it got trapped, and came to the surface today while I was looking for something else.

It records a situation that existed for many months in East Dallas.

Douglas A. Kerr: Joint pole - work in process​

This is a joint pole, meaning that it carries "plant" of two or more entities, here (a) the telephone company (that is, the incumbent local exchange carrier), (b) the power company (that is the electric energy delivery utility; the sale of electric energy is competitive in Dallas), and (c) the cable TV provider. This pole was evidently owned by the electric energy delivery utility (that is common - usually their "stuff" is the biggest, and highest).

The original pole had been hit by a car and injured severely, so it had to be replaced ("subbed" - derives from "instituted") Apparently when the electric delivery company (or its utility contractor) came to do the work, the telephone company had not yet come to mechanically detach all their facilities from the old pole. This included a subscriber line ("loop") cable ("figure eight type", with an integral suspension strand, supported at the pole by a "three-bolt clamp") and a number of subscriber service ("drop") wires going from a terminal on the cable to various homes (each anchored with a wedge tension clamp hooked to a hook on the pole).

So the workers just sawed off that portion of the old pole and put a rope line on the suspension strand to support the cable from a fitting on the new pole - "temporarily".

Somehow the follow-up didn't happen (this had been in place at east six months before I got around to shooting it in 2006, and it still hadn't happened by late 2007 just before we moved from Dallas).

But apparently the terminal cover was inadvertently opened during the process and left open, and some birds moved in.

Ah, the wonders of utility deregulation. It just ain't the same any more!

Doug,

This is not so uncommon. Believe it or not, nuclear plants are strung up in a similar way. A plant can have 50 different pump makes after 5 years running and 50- different panels, valves etc as different companies come and service things. Typically, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has scores of violations per week and these just pile up as they are not attended to and there are few consequences. The net result is the Fukushima meltdown!

"Good enough!" is the main enemy of safety!

Asher

 

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

This shot was taken in 2006, but it got trapped, and came to the surface today while I was looking for something else.

It records a situation that existed for many months in East Dallas.

Hi Doug,

Thanks for sharing. It is a sight that's quite foreign (and therefore interesting) to the situation where I live, where most utility lines are underground to begin with. In a country that for a large part lies below sea level, it poses some challenges, but we've learned to manage them.

Cheers,
Bart

 

[Doug Kerr]

Hi, Asher,

"Good enough!" is the main enemy of safety!

Indeed!

I spent about the first 15 years of my "formal" career working in the former Bell Telephone System (Ohio Bell Telephone company, then AT&T itself, then Bell Telephone Laboratories). The institution had a number of character flaws (it tended to think that it always knew better than the customers, and of course it usually did, but that outlook is not survivable in the modern era), but there was a wonderful culture of always doing it right, with an overriding interest in the safety of employees and the general public as well.

A motto posted in many Bell System workplaces was "No job is so important, and no service so urgent, that we cannot take time to do our work safely".

In my first week on the job with Ohio Bell after I got my engineering degree, as an Assistant Engineer in the Transmission Engineering department (I had worked as an "engineering intern" the summer before my last year of school - but I was very familiar with many aspects of the industry from my many years of study of it as a "hobby"), I fielded a call from a fellow in the Plant Engineering department. This was the group that planned and laid our new cable routes and so forth.

He told me that he was laying our a new cable installation to reach into a new home development. He reminded me that for the type of switching equipment used (number 5 crossbar) the "loop resistance limit" was 2650 ohms; that it, no cable pair to be used for a normal subscriber line should have a predicted resistance, end-to-end, of over 2650 ohms. He asked, "how far beyond 2650 ohms can I go". There are a couple of home sites that would be at 2800 ohms if I use the most straightforward layout..

I said, "well, 2650 ohms is the limit for the regular line circuit, so you can't go beyond that. It's not of course that at 2800 ohms the loop wouldn't work - there is plenty of margin built into the limit in most cases. But it was established on a sound statistical basis, and we observe it as an actual limit. If we didn't, how far beyond would we go?"

He said, "Well, that's what I thought but I just wanted to check. And thanks for the explanation. I don't think I've worked with you before. How long have you been with the company?"

"Since Monday", I told him.

Best regards,

Doug

 

[Doug Kerr]

It was often said that in the Bell Telephone System, every thing was so "cook-book-ized" that the workers in the field were mindless robots. That's an unfair outlook. But there are cases in which it seems justified.

I heard this great story at a safety conference when I was temporarily seconded to the Plant Department (responsible for system maintenance and so forth).

Ohio Bell Telephone Company often had "enroute" transmission equipment (repeaters and such) located in central office buildings of non-Bell companies (as when an Ohio Bell intercity cable passed through the territory of such a company).

On one occasion, an Ohio Bell technician went to such a building to replace (on a regularly-scheduled basis - might have been every five years) the rectifier tubes in a 130 V DC power supply, used to power multiplex repeaters (this was the vacuum tube era). The power supply (actually called a "rectifier") worked in conjunction with a 130 V storage battery string, which would continue to power the transmission equipment while the power supply was shut down for the change of the tubes.

When he arrived, the resident switchman told him that there was a slight complication. The AC distribution arrangements in the building were being reworked by an electrical contractor, and temporarily the AC feed to the power supply was from a circuit breaker that also fed some other piece of equipment that should not be powered down for any substantial time. (Normal practice - yes, from the "cook book" - was that the technician should shut off the power at the circuit breaker, and then on the equipment itself as well, before opening the equipment.) The technician said not to worry, he would shut it off on the power supply itself anyway.

On the power supply, the power switch was actually a small circuit breaker, with a molded handle, and apparently in some accident the handle had been broken off. The technician noted this, and would report it (with the probable result that the entire power supply would be replaced).

The technician then recalled that there was an interlock switch under the cover of the power supply, so that when the cover was removed, the power would be shut off. It was a Microswitch of the type with a fat cylindrical plunger (with a yield spring inside it). He would rely on that to power down the unit.

When he took off the cover (held on, of course, by four Dzus fasteners), he noted that the rectifier tubes (big mercury-vapor types, with a plate cap) were still lit (they had a fearful glow); the interlock switch had apparently failed. He looked at it and saw that the plunger had rusted so it would not move in its bushing.

Having done the best that he could to follow the procedures, he went ahead and grabbed the plate cap lead clip on one of the tubes to remove it so the tube itself could be removed from its socket. There was about 170 V AC there.

When he woke up, he was in a pile on the other side of the room, with the building's first-aid expert tending to him. It turns out that he was not seriously injured.

When he was later debriefed by his supervisor, he told the story. His boss said, "But you knew that the plate clip was still live? Why did you touch it?"

"Well, my God", the technician replied, "I tried everything that was called for in the standard procedure, and none of it worked. What else was I to do?"

Evidently, it never occurred to him what the point was of the process to shut off the power in the unit so he wouldn't be zapped. It was just "procedure", which he was obligated to follow - and he had done his best.

So, the critics were right in this case.

Best regards,

Doug

 

[Mark Hampton]

This shot was taken in 2006, but it got trapped, and came to the surface today while I was looking for something else.

It records a situation that existed for many months in East Dallas.

Douglas A. Kerr: Joint pole - work in process​

This is a joint pole, meaning that it carries "plant" of two or more entities, here (a) the telephone company (that is, the incumbent local exchange carrier), (b) the power company (that is the electric energy delivery utility; the sale of electric energy is competitive in Dallas), and (c) the cable TV provider. This pole was evidently owned by the electric energy delivery utility (that is common - usually their "stuff" is the biggest, and highest).

The original pole had been hit by a car and injured severely, so it had to be replaced ("subbed" - derives from "instituted") Apparently when the electric delivery company (or its utility contractor) came to do the work, the telephone company had not yet come to mechanically detach all their facilities from the old pole. This included a subscriber line ("loop") cable ("figure eight type", with an integral suspension strand, supported at the pole by a "three-bolt clamp") and a number of subscriber service ("drop") wires going from a terminal on the cable to various homes (each anchored with a wedge tension clamp hooked to a hook on the pole).

So the workers just sawed off that portion of the old pole and put a rope line on the suspension strand to support the cable from a fitting on the new pole - "temporarily".

Somehow the follow-up didn't happen (this had been in place at east six months before I got around to shooting it in 2006, and it still hadn't happened by late 2007 just before we moved from Dallas).

But apparently the terminal cover was inadvertently opened during the process and left open, and some birds moved in.

Ah, the wonders of utility deregulation. It just ain't the same any more!

Best regards,

Doug

Doug, i like the idea of you finding the anomalies on these lines, the demonstration of your background knowledge helps so much here. The way you have made the work ties in with the image its self.

are there more to come?

 

[Doug Kerr]

Hi, Mark,

Doug, i like the idea of you finding the anomalies on these lines, the demonstration of your background knowledge helps so much here. The way you have made the work ties in with the image its self.

are there more to come?

Well, I didn't necessarily plan that, but maybe I should.

There are plenty to find (not all as cute as that one, though).

Let me see what I can do,

Thanks for your support.

Best regards,

Doug

 

[StuartRae]

Hi Doug,

Wonderful! It reminds me of some of the software I came across during my stint as a maintenance programmer.

Regards,

Stuart