Thank you for this video. As an ex firefighter, there has been many times we have moved telephone and coax wires out of the way from an accident. I consider myself enlightened after watching this video, and probably will not do that again. Thank you for the education.
Volunteer firefighter here. We always called over one member who worked as an electrician in a refinery. If we couldn't wait for the electric company, he would get his PPE from his truck and take care of it. The rest of us, wouldn't touch it, phone wire or otherwise.
Cop in the Metro Atlanta area of Georgia in the US. Son of a 38-year lineman. I can think of three calls this year where if it had not been for somebody else exercising more consideration, either officers or firemen, acting in what they thought was the best interest of a citizen (or also just clearing the call as fast as possible) would have run a really good chance of gettin ginned up *really* bad, or worse. The limitations of my knowledge pretty much stop at "I don't know enough to know if it's safe so I know enough to leave it the hell alone." I get Georgia power on the line through dispatch, and I just try to wait until an expert can tell me whether or not I'm going to audition for my role in a bug zapper by approaching some lines.
@@Jay-ho9io Hey brother,Gwinnett County resident of 30 years here. I just want 2 say Thank you for your services and may God protect you as you go about your daily journey to assist and protect. To many of our law officers in this country over the past years have earned there wings way too soon,while on the job. It's time we as humans step up and pray even in bigger numbers that you all have God's wrath upon you. Thank you
Wow! I was always taught to stay away from any downed wires no matter what they are for this reason. This really gets the point across. I woke up at 2 in the morning last Sunday to the linemen working in my back yard. A tree took out a pole top in a marshy area down the road. I can assume they were no more thrilled to be awake at that hour than I was, but I am grateful they were. Thank you for the video. They are always interesting to me. Please stay safe, and God bless.
I hate to give a thumbs up lest I seem to be cheering on the forces of entropy that caused all this. Hope nobody was too badly hurt. Several years ago, I was in a house a few yards from presumably 7k lines during a sudden afternoon thunderstorm with crazy wind gusts. There was a flash of nearby lightning but then bright light kept illuminating the room and there was an incredibly loud 60 hertz hum and zappy sound roaring outside. Turns out a line came down and it was arcing away on the ground for several seconds before a breaker tripped somewhere. The grass where it lay was vaporized in a streak quite impressively that remained bare for several months. I will never take downed lines any way but serious as a heart attack after seeing that instantaneous display of raw power.
Telecoms worker in KY USA here, huge kudos to you, @bobsdecline for this informative video! Always assume ANY downed line is hot!! I work with coax daily, but I ALWAYS check any downed coax for voltage before approaching. Also, it is possible for a home to back feed voltage into coax or telephone lines, if for example their neutral is bad. I have come across many coax lines carying anywhere from 40 to 125vac. Its not 7.2kv, but its definitely still enough to get you!!
Had a buddy that was unplugging his modem from his computer during a severe thunderstorm, as he'd already lost one in a similar storm. Just as he was unplugging it, lightning hit and he was launched across the room. Amazingly, only the MOV and relay had failed inside of the modem.
I saw your old vid when it was something around -30 degrees outside and you had that telephone cable burned end-to-end. I show it in all the college classes I teach for future LEOs and EMS personnel to educate them on being smart and safe out in the field when it comes to electricity.
I once had a telephone line drop across my car in a storm. I wasn't going to get out and move it. I knew it was phone cable but it had a bear supporting cable and I could not see both ends. So I did not know if a charged cable had dropped on one end or not. And nearby officer directing traffic started to walk over and move it. But before he could get five steps, his Sergeant screamed at him to stop. I'm glad he knew the drill. It's not like anybody was injured or we were in a hurry so we just waited on the power company to come clear it and make sure there was no voltage going anywhere it shouldn't.
If you don't know don't touch. When I was a kid we had a tornado-like storm that came through the neighborhood. It ripped down lots of trees, power lines, etc. After the storm passed I was navigating around a fallen tree and all of a sudden I realize There is a downed power line only a step or two away from me. I backed away from it. Turns out it was fully energized and had I take one more step forward it likely would have been the last step of my life. It makes.my skin crawl when I think of that incident.
If there is a power line lying on your car and energizing the car, do NOT try to get out of the car. As you step from the car, YOU complete the path from the car to the ground. If the situation is dire enough and the car is still running, drive away. Sooner or later the wire will come off of the car.
I have to be honest but these are the things most people never think about ever in their lives. Things just work until they don’t then you call someone until they do? Thanks for doing what you do.
I would love to have seen them photocells blasting off. These aftermath videos show good analysis of the secondary damage caused by the accident, not just the obvious broken wires and structures. All the best.
Well done. The lights that is. Wow! The power of electricity never ceases to amaze me! Seeing that would leave someone with a more than healthy respect for electricity. I would suggest getting some samples of the damaged wiring and components and donating them to a high school or the trade school to show the students what electricity is capable of doing when not properly controlled. Great video and stay safe.
About 25 years ago, I got called to a traffic signal outage in a road construction zone. We had a microwave detector that ran on a 2pr#18 Belden cable mounted on a wood pole about 400 feet away from the cabinet. A bulldozer had hit the wood pole and it tipped into the 13.8K high wires. When I opened the cabinet, I saw it had smoked nearly all the electronics, fuses, you name it!! After setting a new cabinet we couldn't get the traffic indications to work in the field. It had also exploded all of the light bulbs in the signal heads!! I couldn't believe that tiny #18-gauge wire brought that kind of voltage all the way back. Great video!!!
It isn't the voltage that gets carried by wire gauge, it is current. Though once that wire turns into plasma from having a few kA passing through it and ionizes everything else around it, wire gauge doesn't matter much anymore. I bet there wasn't much if anything left of that #18 wire.
@@teardowndan5364 One thing you brought to my memory...It was a shielded cable, too. It had to stop crosstalk from other cables because of the sensitive microwave signals it was carrying back to the cabinet. Perhaps the shielding helped it carry the current?
@@danlowe8684 If we're talking shielded signal cable like coax or STP, 13kV (18kV peak) likely blew past all electrical isolaiton gaps and went straight to the circuit boards. For power, it would be more likely to be armored with steel tape or braid for mechanical protection than specifically for shielding. Any extra metal would help with conducting the initial current and creating the plasma cloud along the path.
Annnnnd I'm done stripping phone lines with my teeth. I can take the 48VDC when they're idle, and even a quick blast of 96VAC if the line starts ringing on me, but 7200VAC is a huge nope.
Wow that's brave, my brother thought a phone line was only about 9V so used his tongue to see if anything was there....... I believe he ended up on his bum the other side of the room.
@@paulstubbs7678 A telephone line is -48VDC(positive ground) for talk path voltage but, when we were wiring up buildings from scratch before they were connected to the telephone network our tone generators we used to search through cables had a talk setting that put 9VDC on a line and we could put our butt ends on the loop and talk between floors. The ringing goes up to 105 VAC.
It's called a "Blotto Box" and we used to do it all the time back in the day when phreaking was a thing. You could make a nearby phone dangerous to even pick up if you put enough juice in the line. Good times...
In the early 90s, I worked for the cable TV local company. The fire department called me at 3 AM. And said that the cable TV lines were on fire. When I got there, the lashing wire that holds the cable TV wire to the steel. Strand was loose and waving in the air. Every time it smacked, the phone that foot gap lit up. With fire and ran all the way down from one Pole to the other and then down the ground. It turned out that 7200 was touthing the telephone line somewhere. And when the cable TV lashing wire smacked, it lit it up in a ball of fire because the cable TV was grounded on. Several polls down through there were obviously the phone company was not of course.Did not touch it.I called the power company
When I worked for a telecom equipment manufacturing co. in the late 80s, one of the test we have to do to get UL/CSA certification was the power line crossing test. We have to show the equipment and wire in premise won't catch on fire and burn your building down. The equipment can get destroyed but the damage must be contained inside the equipment box. Special fuses was required for the very high voltages. Burn through quite a bit of products looking for the right protection.
I did the same job in the late 80s for a testing agency. We would put the telephone (or computer modem) on a special piece of paper, then send 15kv through the phone lines connected to it. The phone was allowed to blow up internally, but it could not leave any scorch marks on the paper on which it was sitting.
Thanks for making this point. A telecom cable (copper, coax, fibre) often includes a steel messenger. A fault in the power system (possibly kilometers away) can result in the telecom cables being energized and therefore deadly. Never touch a downed line, even if it is a telecom line!
Wow, what damage, did it get into any houses etc. I have heard of instances where home owners reported things 'exploding off the walls' in their houses, this one looks way able to do so.
It looks like “messenger“ wire, which is just used to support the actual coax. Fortunately, it usually just terminates on a J-hook at the pole, as well as the end-user - screwed into stucco/wood/etc. That looks like it could have been a lot worse/costlier.
I volunteer at the Illinois Railway Museum, and all of our electric streetcars/trolleys/Interurban cars run on 600 volt overhead wires, and touching that is crazy dangerous and will likely result in death. I don’t even want to imagine what 7200 volts could do to a person…
I'm thankful there is no similiar powerline design in Europe. It's very very rare to see high voltage distribution line (mostly 15-20 kV here) right over the low voltage line that feeds houses or telephone lines, they are almost never placed on the same poles. Well sometimes a high voltage line breaks and falls on a low voltage line causing a hell of a disaster, but that's so rare and spectacular on the other hand, that there is a big chance you would hear about it in the main news program in the television. You know, it's quite unusual to have 15kV in your house electrical appliances or telephones, and they usually manifest very loudly and fiery that they don't like it ☺
I saw the aftermath when a crane boom came in contact with a 24kv line and it fell onto a chain link fence that had been covered with metal sheeting to hide the scrapyard. There were burn marks all down the fence for two blocks until it stopped at an open gate. Stay away from anything metal until cleared by the power company.
Very interesting to see all the wiring and cable damage along with the LED street light damage. I hope the driver responsible for all that damage will be held financially liable for the equipment replacement + linemen labor‼️ Really no excuse other than maybe DUI. GREAT video as always👍
had a metal carport structure in the driveway growing up, the single phase supply wires to the house have always laid right on the roof. when i was a kid i had been up there on the and touched the wire. shocked the hell out of me but was surprisingly fine. always wondered why touching the metal carport wouldn't shock you.
I was so confused how to were moving around so easily before I realized you were in a cherry picker thing, I thought camera on a stick and you were climbing the pole 😂😂😂
I think that in the U.K the system for getting a repair to be carried out would be far more complex & take weeks to complete. The highways would have to deal with the street light. The telephone companies would deal with the phone cables. The electric company would deal with the power cable. The council would be sought for permission to put temporary traffic lights up etc..
Crazy to see 14gauge wire completely vaporized, that high voltage does NOT mess around. Imagine what it would do to the human nervous system and body 💀
Line voltage does get exciting when it finds its way into the low voltage stuff. Had it happen years ago while staying at my grandparents farm house. Lightning struck the transformer and shunted the line voltage into the feeders for our service. All the wall sockets and light bulbs in the house put on quite a show before the feeders finally melted off the house. Amazingly despite having arcs coming out of everything, nobody was hurt, and the place didn't burn down.
We've got Bell 'Fibe' (fiber optic), and eventually an opportunity arose where I was able to ask the Bell technicians to remove the copper land line from the poles on my property. One less conductive path into the house. Reportedly Bell 'Fibe' cable uses Kevlar as the support strand, not steel.
I was at a small hydro dam where a ground fault had happened. There some phones about 100m away that were not properly isolated. They exploded. Thankfully no one was around.
I think that it's worth mentioning that a lightning strike can deliver a powerful electric shock far in excess of any man made voltage. The highest man made voltage is approximately 30 million volts, the voltage genrated by a lightning strike can be as high as a mind blowing 300 million volts and a current of up to a staggering 30000 amps. As others pointed out here other factors also affect the chance of surviving an electric shock, but a lightning strike is certainly a potentially life threatening medical emergency. Anyone struck by lightning who survives is lucky to be alive.
In NH I'm noticing that the telephone cables during storms are allowed to fall to the ground after pole replacements. They sit there forever since they not in use. Those large telephone cables are useless now and no one cares about them. Eventually, someone is going to have to clean them up. It maybe(already is, I bet) a profitable venture as a scrap operation. Electrical utility-wise they are a nuisance. Coax or fiber are the only things left to hang on poles and those are relatively light weight. That bundle of copper is obsolete.
@@grabasandwich I could oblige but only with photos. I'm not a videographer. The fat telephone cables, when they fall are being ignored. Utility cuts them free from new poles and lets them hang or fall depending on the span. Seriously, no one cares about them. Frankly, I would just because the scrap value is high. Give me the copper, they can keep the lead. Around here in NH, telephone cables are worthless POS...not used anyway...for the most part.
@@nhzxboi When I went to the scrap yard with electrical cables from a panel replacement: I was told he did not want communication cables. They try to minimize the amount of copper used: so it is mainly insulation.
Reminds me of that tornado not too long ago in Charlestown, IIRC! Afterwards, it looked like they left some in-use telecom cables resting on the ground!
This is partly why some wires are much thinner then we might think is wise. Because if they do get connected with some thing like this by accident the wire will burn instead of it following the wire to something else more valuable and burning that thing up, or a person, or a house.
These high voltage lines are no joke. You get about 6 inches from one and you will blow up any wiggy or multimeter not rated for that voltage. This happened to me. I took out 2- 170A fuses at 4160V. My hands, both arms, and face was completely black with soot, no eyebrows left, and I had burns on my palm and wrist. The shift supervisor was standing behind me and he thought I was dead. Have you ever seen a black guy turn white as a ghost? I thought I was going to have to perform CPR on him.
Thanks for making this, try reposting with some different thumbnails and clickbait titles, seeing how the steel and copper core was turned to plasma vapor is a really great PSA on the dangers of approaching a down wire.
had something similar in a lower scale in one of the buildings I work in. back alarm pad wasn't working so we had techs working on it. he touched wires and their was sparks and he found out a 12v line was 120v for some unknow reason.
I was working on a hydronic heating system (homeowner was building an addition and needed to add a zone). The copper piping gave a little tingle, so I presumed one of the 24VAC control wires was shorted to a pipe and made a mental note to trace it out later. A few minutes later, a carpenter touches an overhead pipe and almost goes flying off his ladder. I checked it with a meter and it was 120VAC to ground. "I just saw you touch a pipe and you were fine! Why did I get shocked?!" That's when I realized my electrically-insulated boots had blocked the majority of the voltage so I just got a mild tingle. I tried to always remember to get rated boots, and also not to assume voltage from feel...
@@josephbrown8905 I would be surprised if 24V would give a tingle, that usually indicates way more volts. That reminds me of my brother, he was running a phone line out to a back shed, he thought I had said 'about 9V', so he used his tongue to see if anything was there...... 50V on ones tongue is not a good idea
@@paulstubbs7678 With more experience, yeah, but I was just starting out and since it was so much less than I was used to from the occasional 120VAC, I guessed it was a 24VAC source. I always check, now.
1:31 ... At this frame you can see that the high voltage is still active in the telephone cable on the left side of the frame. There are three balls of fire on the telephone cable.
I couldnt agree more! Treat any downed line as a high voltage line, you dont know what is or isnt energized... yes the coms line may be down but you dont know why its down and if its touching a high voltage line
I personally saw what happens when a 4160VAC power line falls onto a telephone line. The telephones in every office exploded like a grenade and left a huge blackspot on the walls and desks. An asphalt truck hit a pole and broke the power line.
Wow... I'm sure the entire LED driver circuits in those street light heads is completely fried. It's pretty scary (and dangerous) when low voltage stuff gets energized with many kilovolts.
typical problem with US/Canadian power distribution system, everywhere 7kV+ medium voltage lines on the residential streets (subtransmission) very dangerous in cases when this primary wire went down to the ground. I like our Polish/european distribution systems because high voltage primary goes out of residential areas (or underground in city areas), only in some cases some overhead 15kV lines goes through residential areas but are connected to 15/0.4kV transformer which can feed few streets from safer 3x230/400V by overhead or underground, now many primary hv lines which remains as overhead are replacing by underground in cities. Ik this conception of low voltage distribution can be harder in US/Canada by lower voltages and needed higher cross sections of wires on lv distribution poles
Almost all North American household electrical service in fact is split 230 VAC, with common portable household appliances using the split voltage of 115 VAC but special high power appliances like electric stoves and electric clothes dryers and electric water heaters (and more rarely welders and electric car chargers) using the full 230 VAC.
Similar here, but we have pure three phases in houses and uses 400 volts interphase for appliances above 4 kilowatts like water heaters and some electrical stoves, standard appliances works on 230
@@tripplefives1402 HV transmission on steel pylons yes, but subtransmission known here as medium voltage isn't that common in overhead version on residential areas, on residential areas only low voltage is common, i don't know what is in eastern european countries but in central europe and western I never saw much subtransmission 10kV+ on every residential area streets
@@AsXSn do you want me to open up street view and show you? I think maybe its because you are identifying the primaries as LV? In europe its common for the HV to go block to block where large transformers then feed the LV circuits which are shared between 20 or so buildings. In rural Europe though its pretty much identical to north america where HV is on every road and each building has its own transformer. But those HV 11kv primaries are common in european cities especially on the bigger streets. Apartment buildings will typically have underground HV up to a pad mount transformer often in the basement of the building. In the US busy comnercial centers will often have underground, many new subdivisions will also be underground. But almost all naturally unplanned areas just have overhead.
2:50 the copper ground wire you show gets stolen ALL THE TIME here in New Orleans. If the utility company notices it, they'll replace with braded aluminum. Then more copper gets stolen down the line. In some blocks there are no continuous runs of grounding. My question is, does that pose any kind of hazard? I noticed two poles caught fire over the last 10 years, which led me to associate one with the other, but linemen assured me I was wrong, and that system redundancies keep the grounding system intact. What gives??
But what about glass fiber cable?? "Light pole installation hits fiber line, knocks out 911 service in several states" -- today's news. As I understand it, 'fiber' normally has a metal wire in it so it can be traced with a beeper or Metal Detector.
From that headline it sounds like somebody cut an underground cable when digging a hole. I pulled up the article and they have this line: "Workers installing a light pole in Missouri cut into a fiber line, knocking out 911 service for emergency agencies in Nebraska, Nevada and South Dakota". Definitely a purely mechanical fault.
@@eDoc2020 That's why they say if you're lost in the forest, or in the middle of a dessert, always have a piece of fiber with you, and bury it in the ground. A backhoe will be along shortly to hit it (and rescue you as a side benefit)
Copper telephone wires are being phased out-at least for drops to customer premises as fiber lines are strung. I fortunately have two fiber providers at the pole. They removed my copper lines when they hung the fiber drop. Heck, the coax could be removed as well.
One might want electrical POTS for an emergency line, though a cell phone kept charged on an uninterruptable power supply could do as long as it is registered to that address.
@@SeekingTheLoveThatGodMeans7648 nobody is fixing copper lines now either sadly... the old remote power reliability argument isn't worth much if every splice case and pedestal is open to the elements.
A wire is still a wire no matter what insulation it has and though high voltage may not be intended to be carried on the cable, it still can inadvertently, at least momentarily. However, it is only because that coax had it's insulation stripped off by the accident and the bare conductor (or more likely the frame ground braid around the wire for actual coax cables) touched the 7200 v power line. It's not what's supposed to be on that wire that's dangerous but that it was carrying the power from an actual power line next to it that was dangerous.
We had a local idiot cut down a tall tree right next to a substation 4 blocks away which fell on the incoming lines. I lost two power strip surge suppressor's but my $50 whole house suppressor did nothing.
Someone should send this to directv feild service subcontracters in new England who say thete is no reason for them to bond to the intersystem bridge its a waste of time 🙄 🤔
Cable tv installers in my area walk up to a new house to do an install without checking drill from outside into the back of the breaker panel, hit the buss and burned a million dollar house to the ground.
Could you do a video on the hazards of step voltage differential at accident scenes? This week a local Deputy Sheriff was electrocuted while responding to a vehicle accident. 😔
Whoooooie. This is not normally what the average person thinks of associated with a car crash (though fire could be). Dear motoring public, try not to hit utility poles. Police and fire/paramedics would of course want to rush to the vehicle in case someone needs to be saved. But if high voltage has found a path to ground, the ground can become a shock or electrocution trap. Are there detectors for such potential gradients besides people getting shocked or unalived? .
I second this request. I only know about it because it was covered in my training as a contractor to change electric meters. I would use it as a talking point for my fellow tow operators.
This is why the wires should ideally be in the ground, and registered where they are, so nobody digs into them. (is there such a system over there, to register cables, and register where you dig if you want to add one?) But especially if the ground consists of loads of rock for example this will of course not be affordable unfortunately, and someone already decided a long time ago power should be on wooden poles, so you would need to replace a lot of cable with expensive groundcable.
Here in the US we do have a number of buried lines, however, the majority are aerial because its near trivial to tap into them to set up another customer, and it can be done while the line is still energized. It would be much more expensive to have to dig for the wire and then tap into it, which I'm not even sure if that can be done while energized.
"is there such a system over there, to register cables, and register where you dig if you want to add one?" Each company keeps records. When I want a new house, or out-house, I am required to "Call Before You Dig", Dig-Safe. All the likely companies are required to respond quickly and stake-out their wires/pipes, or stake "No wires-- PSE&G". But this is all the last 20-30 years, and poorly enforced. I don't actually know where the last 50 feet of my 40yo service comes in the house. (It does not run like you would think, because we hit it, twice.) The 500' of overhead wire before that is easy to see through trees. I re-dug and moved my sewer a few years back and documented it in detail (10' from tree, 37' from garage...), map tied to where sewer leaves the house; but my neighbor just dug dropped and covered, never measured.
You can't run high or medium voltage AC underground for any kind of serious distance. The conduttors capacitive couple to each other and the ground causing "low leading power-factor"
The wires have to be bigger because they run hotter without air cooling and they have to be sheilded because AC voltage can pass through the insulation into the soil because of capacitance. Even with the sheilding you lose some power because of capacitance with the sheild. When you have faults in underground wiring they are hard to find and dangerous because it energizes the soil in the area for a large distance. Also trees will still pull up the lines when they uproot and lightning will still strike them.
Imagine, all the tree roots one would come across in the NE in rural locations ... not practical. Even some areas have a lot of big sub-surface rocks in the soil, and still other rural locations have slate just a half a foot down ...
Thank you for this video. As an ex firefighter, there has been many times we have moved telephone and coax wires out of the way from an accident. I consider myself enlightened after watching this video, and probably will not do that again. Thank you for the education.
Volunteer firefighter here. We always called over one member who worked as an electrician in a refinery. If we couldn't wait for the electric company, he would get his PPE from his truck and take care of it. The rest of us, wouldn't touch it, phone wire or otherwise.
Cop in the Metro Atlanta area of Georgia in the US. Son of a 38-year lineman.
I can think of three calls this year where if it had not been for somebody else exercising more consideration, either officers or firemen, acting in what they thought was the best interest of a citizen (or also just clearing the call as fast as possible) would have run a really good chance of gettin ginned up *really* bad, or worse.
The limitations of my knowledge pretty much stop at "I don't know enough to know if it's safe so I know enough to leave it the hell alone."
I get Georgia power on the line through dispatch, and I just try to wait until an expert can tell me whether or not I'm going to audition for my role in a bug zapper by approaching some lines.
@@dwayne7356 that guy is a great set of extra skills to have. Nice. 👍🏽
@@Jay-ho9io Hey brother,Gwinnett County resident of 30 years here.
I just want 2 say Thank you for your services and may God protect you as you go about your daily journey to assist and protect.
To many of our law officers in this country over the past years have earned there wings way too soon,while on the job.
It's time we as humans step up and pray even in bigger numbers that you all have God's wrath upon you.
Thank you
@@Utubin I really appreciate that.
Wow! I was always taught to stay away from any downed wires no matter what they are for this reason. This really gets the point across. I woke up at 2 in the morning last Sunday to the linemen working in my back yard. A tree took out a pole top in a marshy area down the road. I can assume they were no more thrilled to be awake at that hour than I was, but I am grateful they were. Thank you for the video. They are always interesting to me. Please stay safe, and God bless.
It's another reason why bonding your home services is so important.
Let me bond my fiber line with a fiberglass spine 😂
@@drcpaintball lol
@@drcpaintball just like the electrical angry pixies them little photons get a little too angry sometimes and need a safe path home lol.
@@drcpaintball Here in the Netherlands those fibers are wrapped in very conductive tylene.
And as all services here.. underground.
This is real eye opener on the power of HIGH VOLTAGE ⚡⚡👍👍
I hate to give a thumbs up lest I seem to be cheering on the forces of entropy that caused all this. Hope nobody was too badly hurt. Several years ago, I was in a house a few yards from presumably 7k lines during a sudden afternoon thunderstorm with crazy wind gusts. There was a flash of nearby lightning but then bright light kept illuminating the room and there was an incredibly loud 60 hertz hum and zappy sound roaring outside. Turns out a line came down and it was arcing away on the ground for several seconds before a breaker tripped somewhere. The grass where it lay was vaporized in a streak quite impressively that remained bare for several months. I will never take downed lines any way but serious as a heart attack after seeing that instantaneous display of raw power.
Telecoms worker in KY USA here, huge kudos to you, @bobsdecline for this informative video! Always assume ANY downed line is hot!! I work with coax daily, but I ALWAYS check any downed coax for voltage before approaching. Also, it is possible for a home to back feed voltage into coax or telephone lines, if for example their neutral is bad. I have come across many coax lines carying anywhere from 40 to 125vac. Its not 7.2kv, but its definitely still enough to get you!!
If that was phone line then someone might have had a shocking conversation 😂I’m sorry I couldn’t resist great video thanks for sharing
😂😂😂😂😂😂👵🏽🥶💀
As he says at 1:34, "my phone was absolutely blowing up."
@@charliesullivan4304 Laughing Out Loud!
Had a buddy that was unplugging his modem from his computer during a severe thunderstorm, as he'd already lost one in a similar storm. Just as he was unplugging it, lightning hit and he was launched across the room.
Amazingly, only the MOV and relay had failed inside of the modem.
I saw your old vid when it was something around -30 degrees outside and you had that telephone cable burned end-to-end.
I show it in all the college classes I teach for future LEOs and EMS personnel to educate them on being smart and safe out in the field when it comes to electricity.
I once had a telephone line drop across my car in a storm. I wasn't going to get out and move it. I knew it was phone cable but it had a bear supporting cable and I could not see both ends. So I did not know if a charged cable had dropped on one end or not. And nearby officer directing traffic started to walk over and move it. But before he could get five steps, his Sergeant screamed at him to stop. I'm glad he knew the drill. It's not like anybody was injured or we were in a hurry so we just waited on the power company to come clear it and make sure there was no voltage going anywhere it shouldn't.
If you don't know don't touch. When I was a kid we had a tornado-like storm that came through the neighborhood. It ripped down lots of trees, power lines, etc. After the storm passed I was navigating around a fallen tree and all of a sudden I realize There is a downed power line only a step or two away from me. I backed away from it. Turns out it was fully energized and had I take one more step forward it likely would have been the last step of my life. It makes.my skin crawl when I think of that incident.
If there is a power line lying on your car and energizing the car, do NOT try to get out of the car. As you step from the car, YOU complete the path from the car to the ground. If the situation is dire enough and the car is still running, drive away. Sooner or later the wire will come off of the car.
1:34 "my phone was blowing up" 😂
And I bet a lot of other people's phones were blowing up too
I have to be honest but these are the things most people never think about ever in their lives. Things just work until they don’t then you call someone until they do? Thanks for doing what you do.
I would love to have seen them photocells blasting off. These aftermath videos show good analysis of the secondary damage caused by the accident, not just the obvious broken wires and structures. All the best.
As a electrician I completely understood everything you were talking about. Great video! Done well enough that most people can understand.
I'am a electrician to mad respect you playing with the big dogs.Stay safe.
Respect to the high line
Thanks for this and all your videos
Well done. The lights that is.
Wow! The power of electricity never ceases to amaze me! Seeing that would leave someone with a more than healthy respect for electricity. I would suggest getting some samples of the damaged wiring and components and donating them to a high school or the trade school to show the students what electricity is capable of doing when not properly controlled.
Great video and stay safe.
Thanks for helping keep the Lights ON and for Restoring Power. 👍🙏
As a retired Telcom lineman, I always used my voltage tester before touching anything.
About 25 years ago, I got called to a traffic signal outage in a road construction zone. We had a microwave detector that ran on a 2pr#18 Belden cable mounted on a wood pole about 400 feet away from the cabinet. A bulldozer had hit the wood pole and it tipped into the 13.8K high wires. When I opened the cabinet, I saw it had smoked nearly all the electronics, fuses, you name it!! After setting a new cabinet we couldn't get the traffic indications to work in the field. It had also exploded all of the light bulbs in the signal heads!! I couldn't believe that tiny #18-gauge wire brought that kind of voltage all the way back. Great video!!!
I bet the traffic signals were real bright..............for a moment.
It isn't the voltage that gets carried by wire gauge, it is current. Though once that wire turns into plasma from having a few kA passing through it and ionizes everything else around it, wire gauge doesn't matter much anymore. I bet there wasn't much if anything left of that #18 wire.
@@teardowndan5364 Thank you!!
@@teardowndan5364 One thing you brought to my memory...It was a shielded cable, too. It had to stop crosstalk from other cables because of the sensitive microwave signals it was carrying back to the cabinet. Perhaps the shielding helped it carry the current?
@@danlowe8684 If we're talking shielded signal cable like coax or STP, 13kV (18kV peak) likely blew past all electrical isolaiton gaps and went straight to the circuit boards. For power, it would be more likely to be armored with steel tape or braid for mechanical protection than specifically for shielding.
Any extra metal would help with conducting the initial current and creating the plasma cloud along the path.
That’s the real “HOT LINE”…..just need a red Bat Man phone!
Annnnnd I'm done stripping phone lines with my teeth. I can take the 48VDC when they're idle, and even a quick blast of 96VAC if the line starts ringing on me, but 7200VAC is a huge nope.
Not good for the teeth either, personal knowledge. 😎
Wow that's brave, my brother thought a phone line was only about 9V so used his tongue to see if anything was there.......
I believe he ended up on his bum the other side of the room.
@@paulstubbs7678 A telephone line is -48VDC(positive ground) for talk path voltage but, when we were wiring up buildings from scratch before they were connected to the telephone network our tone generators we used to search through cables had a talk setting that put 9VDC on a line and we could put our butt ends on the loop and talk between floors. The ringing goes up to 105 VAC.
Lol
You’d be crying like a baby if there was any substantial current to that.
It's called a "Blotto Box" and we used to do it all the time back in the day when phreaking was a thing.
You could make a nearby phone dangerous to even pick up if you put enough juice in the line.
Good times...
Brings a whole new meaning to reach out and touch somebody.
In this case, it's more like... "Reach out and 'torch' someone."
In the early 90s, I worked for the cable TV local company. The fire department called me at 3 AM. And said that the cable TV lines were on fire. When I got there, the lashing wire that holds the cable TV wire to the steel. Strand was loose and waving in the air. Every time it smacked, the phone that foot gap lit up. With fire and ran all the way down from one Pole to the other and then down the ground. It turned out that 7200 was touthing the telephone line somewhere. And when the cable TV lashing wire smacked, it lit it up in a ball of fire because the cable TV was grounded on. Several polls down through there were obviously the phone company was not of course.Did not touch it.I called the power company
Thank you for what you do man, eyes up and stay safe out there!
When I worked for a telecom equipment manufacturing co. in the late 80s, one of the test we have to do to get UL/CSA certification was the power line crossing test. We have to show the equipment and wire in premise won't catch on fire and burn your building down. The equipment can get destroyed but the damage must be contained inside the equipment box. Special fuses was required for the very high voltages. Burn through quite a bit of products looking for the right protection.
I did the same job in the late 80s for a testing agency. We would put the telephone (or computer modem) on a special piece of paper, then send 15kv through the phone lines connected to it. The phone was allowed to blow up internally, but it could not leave any scorch marks on the paper on which it was sitting.
Thanks for making this point. A telecom cable (copper, coax, fibre) often includes a steel messenger. A fault in the power system (possibly kilometers away) can result in the telecom cables being energized and therefore deadly. Never touch a downed line, even if it is a telecom line!
Cool, the power of 7200 volts. Thanks for sharing.
Wow, what damage, did it get into any houses etc. I have heard of instances where home owners reported things 'exploding off the walls' in their houses, this one looks way able to do so.
Must of been around 1ka to melt the pole ground wire.
our pole grounds are 25mm2 / 4awg which fails around 945Amps
Thank you for showing us the unexpected so that we can make informed decisions to keep ourselves safe. 🌟
not to mention stay in your vehicle if you think a line has fallen on it. Love your content brother.
It looks like “messenger“ wire, which is just used to support the actual coax. Fortunately, it usually just terminates on a J-hook at the pole, as well as the end-user - screwed into stucco/wood/etc. That looks like it could have been a lot worse/costlier.
WOW, amazing.
Linemen and Truck Drivers, they keep the world spinning.
I work with coax as a lineman for a telcom company in Florida. The metal peice is call messanger wore for aeeial cable.
I saw the title and thought there was some magical power delivery method using old telephone lines 😅
7200 Volts melted all the snow too! Amazing power! 🙃
I volunteer at the Illinois Railway Museum, and all of our electric streetcars/trolleys/Interurban cars run on 600 volt overhead wires, and touching that is crazy dangerous and will likely result in death. I don’t even want to imagine what 7200 volts could do to a person…
I'm thankful there is no similiar powerline design in Europe. It's very very rare to see high voltage distribution line (mostly 15-20 kV here) right over the low voltage line that feeds houses or telephone lines, they are almost never placed on the same poles. Well sometimes a high voltage line breaks and falls on a low voltage line causing a hell of a disaster, but that's so rare and spectacular on the other hand, that there is a big chance you would hear about it in the main news program in the television. You know, it's quite unusual to have 15kV in your house electrical appliances or telephones, and they usually manifest very loudly and fiery that they don't like it ☺
I saw the aftermath when a crane boom came in contact with a 24kv line and it fell onto a chain link fence that had been covered with metal sheeting to hide the scrapyard. There were burn marks all down the fence for two blocks until it stopped at an open gate. Stay away from anything metal until cleared by the power company.
The steel wire on a coaxial drop is called the "messenger". In this case, the 7.2kW shot the messenger.
KV not KW
Very interesting to see all the wiring and cable damage along with the LED street light damage. I hope the driver responsible for all that damage will be held financially liable for the equipment replacement + linemen labor‼️
Really no excuse other than maybe DUI. GREAT video as always👍
Being drunk isn't an excuse. Get a taxi or something
had a metal carport structure in the driveway growing up, the single phase supply wires to the house have always laid right on the roof. when i was a kid i had been up there on the and touched the wire. shocked the hell out of me but was surprisingly fine. always wondered why touching the metal carport wouldn't shock you.
That's pretty crazy man. Thanks for the video. You rock.
Good video Aaron. It's amazing how fast 7K travels so fast and the damage that it can take with it on low voltage wiring.
PS. Still looking forward to you possibly doing a video on open neutrals and how it can create hazardous conditions for things like coax.
I was so confused how to were moving around so easily before I realized you were in a cherry picker thing, I thought camera on a stick and you were climbing the pole 😂😂😂
Fascinating thank you
I think that in the U.K the system for getting a repair to be carried out would be far more complex & take weeks to complete. The highways would have to deal with the street light. The telephone companies would deal with the phone cables. The electric company would deal with the power cable. The council would be sought for permission to put temporary traffic lights up etc..
Says “telephone wire” over and over while patting the coax. 🤦🏽♂️
Crazy to see 14gauge wire completely vaporized, that high voltage does NOT mess around. Imagine what it would do to the human nervous system and body 💀
Line voltage does get exciting when it finds its way into the low voltage stuff. Had it happen years ago while staying at my grandparents farm house. Lightning struck the transformer and shunted the line voltage into the feeders for our service. All the wall sockets and light bulbs in the house put on quite a show before the feeders finally melted off the house. Amazingly despite having arcs coming out of everything, nobody was hurt, and the place didn't burn down.
4:52 anyone else notice there is NO bolt in that bottom bracket for the light fixture.
There is now! Lol
YES I did!!!
snap.......crackle.......and pop!
GREAT VIDEO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
We've got Bell 'Fibe' (fiber optic), and eventually an opportunity arose where I was able to ask the Bell technicians to remove the copper land line from the poles on my property. One less conductive path into the house. Reportedly Bell 'Fibe' cable uses Kevlar as the support strand, not steel.
I was at a small hydro dam where a ground fault had happened. There some phones about 100m away that were not properly isolated. They exploded. Thankfully no one was around.
I think that it's worth mentioning that a lightning strike can deliver a powerful electric shock far in excess of any man made voltage. The highest man made voltage is approximately 30 million volts, the voltage genrated by a lightning strike can be as high as a mind blowing 300 million volts and a current of up to a staggering 30000 amps. As others pointed out here other factors also affect the chance of surviving an electric shock, but a lightning strike is certainly a potentially life threatening medical emergency. Anyone struck by lightning who survives is lucky to be alive.
I called my local Fire Dept. about downed communication wires recently and they were not interested "unless its arcing" 😮💨
Fantastic videography up on the pole.
Great lesson about never touching ANY downed wire !!!
We just had a lineman get ahold of a 7,200 volt line. Burnt his hands and arms bad. He's still alive.
In NH I'm noticing that the telephone cables during storms are allowed to fall to the ground after pole replacements. They sit there forever since they not in use. Those large telephone cables are useless now and no one cares about them. Eventually, someone is going to have to clean them up. It maybe(already is, I bet) a profitable venture as a scrap operation. Electrical utility-wise they are a nuisance. Coax or fiber are the only things left to hang on poles and those are relatively light weight. That bundle of copper is obsolete.
I'd like to see a video of that! Where I am most of the coax and twisted pair is lashed together so it'll probably be left in place forever.
@@grabasandwich I could oblige but only with photos. I'm not a videographer. The fat telephone cables, when they fall are being ignored. Utility cuts them free from new poles and lets them hang or fall depending on the span. Seriously, no one cares about them. Frankly, I would just because the scrap value is high. Give me the copper, they can keep the lead. Around here in NH, telephone cables are worthless POS...not used anyway...for the most part.
@@nhzxboi When I went to the scrap yard with electrical cables from a panel replacement: I was told he did not want communication cables. They try to minimize the amount of copper used: so it is mainly insulation.
Reminds me of that tornado not too long ago in Charlestown, IIRC! Afterwards, it looked like they left some in-use telecom cables resting on the ground!
This is partly why some wires are much thinner then we might think is wise. Because if they do get connected with some thing like this by accident the wire will burn instead of it following the wire to something else more valuable and burning that thing up, or a person, or a house.
Good one Aaron. Multiple “shocktic places” as we used to call them.
👍👍‼️
These high voltage lines are no joke.
You get about 6 inches from one and you will blow up any wiggy or multimeter not rated for that voltage.
This happened to me.
I took out 2- 170A fuses at 4160V.
My hands, both arms, and face was completely black with soot, no eyebrows left, and I had burns on my palm and wrist.
The shift supervisor was standing behind me and he thought I was dead.
Have you ever seen a black guy turn white as a ghost?
I thought I was going to have to perform CPR on him.
Thank you...
Thanks for making this, try reposting with some different thumbnails and clickbait titles, seeing how the steel and copper core was turned to plasma vapor is a really great PSA on the dangers of approaching a down wire.
had something similar in a lower scale in one of the buildings I work in. back alarm pad wasn't working so we had techs working on it. he touched wires and their was sparks and he found out a 12v line was 120v for some unknow reason.
I was working on a hydronic heating system (homeowner was building an addition and needed to add a zone). The copper piping gave a little tingle, so I presumed one of the 24VAC control wires was shorted to a pipe and made a mental note to trace it out later. A few minutes later, a carpenter touches an overhead pipe and almost goes flying off his ladder. I checked it with a meter and it was 120VAC to ground. "I just saw you touch a pipe and you were fine! Why did I get shocked?!" That's when I realized my electrically-insulated boots had blocked the majority of the voltage so I just got a mild tingle. I tried to always remember to get rated boots, and also not to assume voltage from feel...
ouch @@josephbrown8905
@@josephbrown8905 Rated Redwings saved me more than a few times in the heavy industrial environment.
@@josephbrown8905 I would be surprised if 24V would give a tingle, that usually indicates way more volts.
That reminds me of my brother, he was running a phone line out to a back shed, he thought I had said 'about 9V', so he used his tongue to see if anything was there......
50V on ones tongue is not a good idea
@@paulstubbs7678 With more experience, yeah, but I was just starting out and since it was so much less than I was used to from the occasional 120VAC, I guessed it was a 24VAC source. I always check, now.
The hell is all these commercials for
1:31 ... At this frame you can see that the high voltage is still active in the telephone cable on the left side of the frame. There are three balls of fire on the telephone cable.
Thank you for the heads up on , not touching any wires at all if there are lines down 👍👍
Wow pretty crazy blowing the housings off the photocells! RIP LED Roadway Lighting NXT's.
One of the reasons why we put all these wires underground in the Netherlands
False confidence is a terrible idea . If you don’t know don’t touch it . We’ve had copper cables welded to one piece .
I couldnt agree more! Treat any downed line as a high voltage line, you dont know what is or isnt energized... yes the coms line may be down but you dont know why its down and if its touching a high voltage line
3:05 I wonder how differently that would have played out had copper thieves previously cut the first couple feet off like I often see? 😮
I personally saw what happens when a 4160VAC power line falls onto a telephone line.
The telephones in every office exploded like a grenade and left a huge blackspot on the walls and desks.
An asphalt truck hit a pole and broke the power line.
Good advice!
Wow... I'm sure the entire LED driver circuits in those street light heads is completely fried. It's pretty scary (and dangerous) when low voltage stuff gets energized with many kilovolts.
5:50 is what every single LED light should earn imo 😂😂😂
typical problem with US/Canadian power distribution system, everywhere 7kV+ medium voltage lines on the residential streets (subtransmission) very dangerous in cases when this primary wire went down to the ground.
I like our Polish/european distribution systems because high voltage primary goes out of residential areas (or underground in city areas), only in some cases some overhead 15kV lines goes through residential areas but are connected to 15/0.4kV transformer which can feed few streets from safer 3x230/400V by overhead or underground, now many primary hv lines which remains as overhead are replacing by underground in cities.
Ik this conception of low voltage distribution can be harder in US/Canada by lower voltages and needed higher cross sections of wires on lv distribution poles
Almost all North American household electrical service in fact is split 230 VAC, with common portable household appliances using the split voltage of 115 VAC but special high power appliances like electric stoves and electric clothes dryers and electric water heaters (and more rarely welders and electric car chargers) using the full 230 VAC.
Similar here, but we have pure three phases in houses and uses 400 volts interphase for appliances above 4 kilowatts like water heaters and some electrical stoves, standard appliances works on 230
Above ground HV is common even in Europe. Just open up street view and look.
@@tripplefives1402 HV transmission on steel pylons yes, but subtransmission known here as medium voltage isn't that common in overhead version on residential areas, on residential areas only low voltage is common, i don't know what is in eastern european countries but in central europe and western I never saw much subtransmission 10kV+ on every residential area streets
@@AsXSn do you want me to open up street view and show you? I think maybe its because you are identifying the primaries as LV?
In europe its common for the HV to go block to block where large transformers then feed the LV circuits which are shared between 20 or so buildings. In rural Europe though its pretty much identical to north america where HV is on every road and each building has its own transformer. But those HV 11kv primaries are common in european cities especially on the bigger streets. Apartment buildings will typically have underground HV up to a pad mount transformer often in the basement of the building.
In the US busy comnercial centers will often have underground, many new subdivisions will also be underground. But almost all naturally unplanned areas just have overhead.
Good video on just how really dangerous overhead lines are, and how electricity can find it's way to close the circuit
2:50 the copper ground wire you show gets stolen ALL THE TIME here in New Orleans. If the utility company notices it, they'll replace with braded aluminum. Then more copper gets stolen down the line. In some blocks there are no continuous runs of grounding. My question is, does that pose any kind of hazard? I noticed two poles caught fire over the last 10 years, which led me to associate one with the other, but linemen assured me I was wrong, and that system redundancies keep the grounding system intact. What gives??
But what about glass fiber cable?? "Light pole installation hits fiber line, knocks out 911 service in several states" -- today's news. As I understand it, 'fiber' normally has a metal wire in it so it can be traced with a beeper or Metal Detector.
From that headline it sounds like somebody cut an underground cable when digging a hole.
I pulled up the article and they have this line: "Workers installing a light pole in Missouri cut into a fiber line, knocking out 911 service for emergency agencies in Nebraska, Nevada and South Dakota". Definitely a purely mechanical fault.
@@eDoc2020 That's why they say if you're lost in the forest, or in the middle of a dessert, always have a piece of fiber with you, and bury it in the ground. A backhoe will be along shortly to hit it (and rescue you as a side benefit)
Copper telephone wires are being phased out-at least for drops to customer premises as fiber lines are strung. I fortunately have two fiber providers at the pole. They removed my copper lines when they hung the fiber drop. Heck, the coax could be removed as well.
One might want electrical POTS for an emergency line, though a cell phone kept charged on an uninterruptable power supply could do as long as it is registered to that address.
@@SeekingTheLoveThatGodMeans7648 nobody is fixing copper lines now either sadly... the old remote power reliability argument isn't worth much if every splice case and pedestal is open to the elements.
You still need that steel cable if you are suspending a fiber line.
@@jamesphillips2285 my ~100ft drop doesn’t have a carrier wire. They ran a drop for a friend of mine over 300ft without a carrier wire as well.
@@SeekingTheLoveThatGodMeans7648 This is true in a lot of commercial buildings where they are required for life safety devices.
im so glad i have fiber internet
At that HV the LV conductors just act like fuses basically, which is not necessarily a bad thing.
A wire is still a wire no matter what insulation it has and though high voltage may not be intended to be carried on the cable, it still can inadvertently, at least momentarily. However, it is only because that coax had it's insulation stripped off by the accident and the bare conductor (or more likely the frame ground braid around the wire for actual coax cables) touched the 7200 v power line. It's not what's supposed to be on that wire that's dangerous but that it was carrying the power from an actual power line next to it that was dangerous.
We had a local idiot cut down a tall tree right next to a substation 4 blocks away which fell on the incoming lines. I lost two power strip surge suppressor's but my $50 whole house suppressor did nothing.
That’s my house, I was in my truck and the lines to my house landed on my truck.
That’s not telephone wire, it’s cable!
What is the height of the streetlights?
Yikes! This is why I'm glad I have FTTH for internet, because of the possibility of that happening during bad weather.
Wow not the way at&t wanted you to reach out and touch someone lol
I’m still thinking of you buddy! Hoping you’re being very kind to yourself & everything is better?
Someone should send this to directv feild service subcontracters in new England who say thete is no reason for them to bond to the intersystem bridge its a waste of time 🙄 🤔
Cable tv installers in my area walk up to a new house to do an install without checking drill from outside into the back of the breaker panel, hit the buss and burned a million dollar house to the ground.
Could you do a video on the hazards of step voltage differential at accident scenes?
This week a local Deputy Sheriff was electrocuted while responding to a vehicle accident. 😔
Whoooooie. This is not normally what the average person thinks of associated with a car crash (though fire could be). Dear motoring public, try not to hit utility poles. Police and fire/paramedics would of course want to rush to the vehicle in case someone needs to be saved. But if high voltage has found a path to ground, the ground can become a shock or electrocution trap. Are there detectors for such potential gradients besides people getting shocked or unalived? .
I second this request. I only know about it because it was covered in my training as a contractor to change electric meters. I would use it as a talking point for my fellow tow operators.
I've definitely been wanting to do a video on this
This is why distirbution and transmission line should use ground fault protection like in Europe.
new fear unlocked
Thank you. I thought that certain wires were safe. I now know better.
Even if you know it’s abandoned we treat it as hot. Yeah it’s over kill but it’ll keep you alive!
This is why the wires should ideally be in the ground, and registered where they are, so nobody digs into them. (is there such a system over there, to register cables, and register where you dig if you want to add one?) But especially if the ground consists of loads of rock for example this will of course not be affordable unfortunately, and someone already decided a long time ago power should be on wooden poles, so you would need to replace a lot of cable with expensive groundcable.
Here in the US we do have a number of buried lines, however, the majority are aerial because its near trivial to tap into them to set up another customer, and it can be done while the line is still energized. It would be much more expensive to have to dig for the wire and then tap into it, which I'm not even sure if that can be done while energized.
"is there such a system over there, to register cables, and register where you dig if you want to add one?" Each company keeps records. When I want a new house, or out-house, I am required to "Call Before You Dig", Dig-Safe. All the likely companies are required to respond quickly and stake-out their wires/pipes, or stake "No wires-- PSE&G". But this is all the last 20-30 years, and poorly enforced. I don't actually know where the last 50 feet of my 40yo service comes in the house. (It does not run like you would think, because we hit it, twice.) The 500' of overhead wire before that is easy to see through trees. I re-dug and moved my sewer a few years back and documented it in detail (10' from tree, 37' from garage...), map tied to where sewer leaves the house; but my neighbor just dug dropped and covered, never measured.
You can't run high or medium voltage AC underground for any kind of serious distance. The conduttors capacitive couple to each other and the ground causing "low leading power-factor"
The wires have to be bigger because they run hotter without air cooling and they have to be sheilded because AC voltage can pass through the insulation into the soil because of capacitance. Even with the sheilding you lose some power because of capacitance with the sheild.
When you have faults in underground wiring they are hard to find and dangerous because it energizes the soil in the area for a large distance. Also trees will still pull up the lines when they uproot and lightning will still strike them.
Imagine, all the tree roots one would come across in the NE in rural locations ... not practical. Even some areas have a lot of big sub-surface rocks in the soil, and still other rural locations have slate just a half a foot down ...