Rick and Bonnie,

How often do substations catch on fire by themselves? I just heard about a substation fire in upstate New York. Are these rare events? or is this a case of the "red truck"?

I hope you will be passing along any relevant information from EEI. I get to much mail already.

Mike

PS you both do an excellent job!!

-- Anonymous, March 06, 1999

Answers

Mike:

It's mostly mechanical equipment. A lot of it is very old. We see faults caused by both metal fatigue and critters(frogs and snakes). We have 12 kV buses that can source 15,000 amp fault currents. If you do the math this is thousands of pounds of force trying to tear the switch apart. Some faults can be quite spectacular!

Jim

-- Anonymous, March 12, 1999

Some time in the late 1970s, when I was an undergraduate, one evening there was a blue flash on the horizon, followed by a loud noise, followed by lights going out, followed by several days of rolling outages, when the largest transformer in the county where Purdue University is located exploded.

The local paper said they found a smoking racoon tail in the rubbble...

-- Anonymous, March 16, 1999