STORM2K

After 4 hours without ANY phone service, landline OR cellphone, we're back up and running.....HOWEVER, something VERY fishy was going on, I can't say nor can I put my finger on it, it had something to with the fiber optic main trunk in Holbrook....if you'll remember back to Sept 11th, 3 terrorists were caught JUST off I-40 and Holbrook. If I find out something that I can post, I'll do so, until then.......

Dennis

Keep us posted Dennis.

Glad you guys are armed!!!!!!

Seriously, stay safe.
((Hugs))
Dink

Are you anywhere near this? Sun City?

Substation catches fire; customers asked to cut power usage

Michael Chow/The Arizona Republic

A fire burns at a transformer near Sun City on Sunday night. Fireworks can be seen to the left and right.

More transformers threatened by blaze near Sun City, officials say

Emily Bittner
The Arizona Republic
Jul. 5, 2004 12:00 PM


Power authorities are asking residents to cut back on their electricity use through the end of the week because a fire at the Westwing substation has eliminated 20 percent of the Valley's usual supply.

Damon Gross, a spokesman for Arizona Public Service, which operates the substation’s transformers, said no customers had lost power as of Monday morning.

“Our job is to plan for any contingency,” Gross said. “We feel like we're in a good position today. We have the energy supplies for our customers. The challenge is the way to transport the energy to our customers.”

The voluntary cutbacks are a pre-emptive move to avoid power outages, Gross said. Westwing is one of four major substations that conduct power for the Valley.

“If you're home today, try to just be conscious of not having all the lights on and all the fans on,” said Kore Redden, a spokeswoman for Rural/Metro Fire Department.

No cause for the fire, which started around 7 p.m. Sunday, has been determined. No one has been injured.

The station, near Loop 303 and Happy Valley Road, has 13 transformers, which convert power from 500,000 volts to 230,000 volts. The power is eventually reduced to a voltage level that can be used in homes.

Four of the transformers are burning and a fifth is in danger of catching fire, authorities said Monday morning. The structures are cooled with a mineral oil, and that same oil is fueling the fires and spreading black smoke from the northwest part of the Valley, they said.

APS environmental inspectors are assessing the situation.

“There's dense smoke in the area and there's very heavy burning black smoke in the immediate area,” Redden said. “For today and the next several days, the air quality is going to get very poor.”

Through the night Sunday and until Monday morning, firefighters used a water curtain to protect the fifth tower from the heat generated by its neighbors. About half a dozen fire engines pumped 200 gallons of water per minute to cool the metal transformer, Redden said.

The structure could ignite at around 200 degrees, she said. Firefighters used thermal-imaging cameras and estimated the transformer's temperature to be 100 degrees Monday morning.

According to published reports, the Westwing substation played a role in the shutdown last month of the Palo Verde nuclear power plant. An insulator failure sent a power line into a transmission tower, short-circuiting the equipment, according to a Dow Jones story June 15. Protective equipment at Westwing failed, along with two switchyards, eventually shutting down the plant.

Gross cautioned Monday against drawing parallels between the June failure and Sunday's fire.

“We just do not know what the cause is,” he said. At first, nine fire departments responded to the blaze. Only Rural/Metro firefighters remained Monday morning, monitoring the fires and hoping they would burn themselves out.

No one has any estimate of when the fires could burn themselves out, Redden said.

“We're not going to be surprised if it burns for the next 12 to 24 hours,” she said. “It's going to last for a while.”

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/ ... mer05.html

Surely this has interruped power somewhere.

No, Sun City is in the Phoenix area well to the west of Pinetop and well SW of Holbrook. Of course, if the fiberoptic is run by Qworst that would explain everything. Will probably find out that a contractor cut the cable since it's cheaper for them to do so than to hunt around for all of the cables and rerouting trenches.

Steve

Is that near azskyman?

Wow. Thanks for the info everyone. I hope everything is all right.

It is closer to Poppysky Lindaloo.

I hope everything is alright Dennis!

That is very odd... I thought Cell phones worked no matter what as they were via towers unrelated to landlines-interresting-hope all is well out there.

Well....here's the *story* (there's more here than meets the eye)


Cut fiber optic cable disables regional communication
Rural 911 service down for five hours




By: Donna Rescorla , The Independent 07/09/2004




THE WHITE MOUNTAINS - The White Mountains lost phone contact with the outside world, and with each other, for a few hours Tuesday.

Advertisement


When a contractor working on the traffic signal installation at Main Street and Snowflake Boulevard cut through Frontier Communications' fiber optic lines, it cut all long distance service in the area from Eagar/Springerville and St. Johns to Heber/Overgaard and Holbrook. With a single slice from construction equipment, e-mail, Internet service, long distance and, in some cases, cell phone use, depending on the company. Although most local service was unaffected, it was reported those with a 536 prefix (Snowflake area) did lose all service for a few minutes.
Problems were first reported about noon with everything back up by about 5 p.m., Emergency Management Director Larry Dunagan said, adding he wasn't notified by the telephone company until about 2:30 p.m.
Dunagan's gravest concern was for those areas of the county relying on the Navajo County Sheriff's Office for 911 dispatch.
"People living in municipalities such as Show Low, Pinetop-Lakeside and Snowflake/Taylor could call 911, but others couldn't call," Dunagan said. "Although the Heber/Overgaard area uses Snowflake for dispatch, they were affected because it is long distance for them."
Dunagan said firefighters from Pinetop who are battling the Willow Fire near Payson tried to contact their station but were unable to do so. The message had to be relayed over deputies' radios.
Because they all have radios, the deputies can communicate but, Dunagan said, he couldn't communicate by e-mail with various dispatch centers.
"It's upsetting they (Frontier) don't have a redundant system, some way to reroute calls," he said. "Dispatch can't give out information because it's all done on telephone and various dispatchers can't talk to each others. I have wireless Internet but I can't e-mail to those who have dial up service. Deputies became the relay."
Cell phone service was somewhat spotty, some working with no noticeable problem and others not working properly depending where the user called.
With the fire conditions at a critical level, the loss of phone service is an even greater concern. If a fire broke out, it would take more time to get the information out. However, Dunagan said, they could still activate the citizen's alert system to notify people if they needed to evacuate. He said the information is programmed into his cell phone and he can contact Show Low to start the process.
He said he was already in touch with the state emergency management people so they will be aware of the problem in case something major occurred.
Dunagan said he and the county's Management Information Services department want to have wireless Internet service to connect the county but, he said, it would only apply to government services.
"It's a matter of getting everything in place so we still have lines of communication," he said.
Dunagan told The Independent the following day that he didn't hear of any problems resulting from the 911 system being down

Yep, you called it Snowman.

Does AZ have a One Call system?

In my state every contractor knows to make the one call before they dig.

It's an integrated public service system designed to notify those digging of where underground utilities are so where not to dig. There's also an extensive campaign to notify the public of their responsibility to call before they dig.

http://www.paonecall.org/

And, it's the law.

Our purpose is to prevent damage to underground facilities. To promote safety, we provide an efficient, cost effective communications network among designers, excavators, and facility owners.

That contractor would be paying damages and a hefty fine if they hadn't placed the call. Instead of tieing up litagation in courts for however long it would take to settle liability.

Governor Rendell said. "For example, we believe we can make a significant improvement by encouraging excavators to use PA One Call, the statewide communications network that maintains maps of underground utilities and provides information to the public about where to dig safely."

Pennsylvania law requires people to contact PA One Call before digging, and violators can receive fines and be held liable for damages. Failure to use the system can result in disruption to vital utilities - such as natural gas, phone services including 911, and electricity. PA One Call Executive Director William Kiger reported that the system fielded more than 500,000 calls last year, yet there were about 20,000 hits to registered utilities in Pennsylvania.

The number of hits to utilities signals a clear need for improvement, Labor & Industry Secretary Stephen Schmerin said. "Real danger is the result when people don't Call Before You Dig, you're taking the safety of Pennsylvanians into your own hands, and that's not acceptable."

press release

Yep, Kiko, I'm very familiar with PA one call.
Utility companies are responsible for registering with the system, and being responsive when an inquiry is made. Designers are to make a call during design to get utility companies to mark the lines so the new work can be designed around them when possible. Contractors are to make a call before digging so the utility companies can mark them immediately before the excavation is started. I believe that there is an 18" tolerance on the markings. If a contractor hits a line that was marked correctly (or within 18" of being correct), it's the contractor's liability. If the line is marked incorrectly, it's the utility company's liability. There are many old utility lines in PA, and the utility companies don't always have accurate mapping of their lines. So if a contractor hits a line, it's not always automatically the contractor's fault. I have seen many instances where the utility companies - especially owners of water lines in older communities have no idea where their lines are. The gas, electric, and telephone lines were usually installed more recently, and better records usually exist.

I know that fiber optic lines are very expensive to repair. You can't just patch them. It can become necessary to replace miles and miles of lines between established junction points. Contractors can be assessed hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs if they are at fault for hitting fiber optic lines. For that reason, contractors are not careless around them. Likewise gas lines, which of course can cause fire or explosions. Sometimes contractors will just tear through water and sewer lines because they're easy to repair. It can be cheaper and faster to dig through them and repair them than it would be to do a lot of hand digging to expose and protect a line that may be marked incorrectly.

Yes Kiko, in fact, in our business, aside from being reserve peace officers, (commercial landscaping/maintenance) we have to call what's called "Blue Stake". Before ANY work in the *Right Of Way* is done, you are REQUIRED by LAW to call, then the utilitiy companies will come out, flag their underground lines etc, if you DON'T call and you do indeed hit a line, gas line, etc. etc, YOU DO have to pay ALL repair costs PLUS a HUGE fine!

Dennis

However, as we found out with the Contractors on Fort Hucahuca, even with the repair costs and fines it was still cheaper and less time consuming to go ahead and kick the tires and light the fire and just dig the trench straight across anything that might get in the way. We've lost water, power and phones here in our Mobile Home Park the same way.

Steve

Aslkahuna wrote:However, as we found out with the Contractors on Fort Hucahuca, even with the repair costs and fines it was still cheaper and less time consuming to go ahead and kick the tires and light the fire and just dig the trench straight across anything that might get in the way. We've lost water, power and phones here in our Mobile Home Park the same way.

Steve

"LOL!" Sad but TRUE! There's a contractor up here, another Landscape Installation contractor, they were installing a very large irrigation system 2 years ago, Unisource (natural gas company) was SUPPOSE to Blue Stake their 6" underground, gas main. WELL...they *kinda* did, the contractor ignored the EXACT location, HIT the gas main, now bear in mind, this was in FRONT of Navopache Hospital on Hwy 260 East, needless to say, the highway was closed for 6 HOURS while repairs were made, the contractor was fined $50,000 PLUS the repair cost.

Dennis