Driving around countrysides, I often seen power lines/telephone poles at regular intervals through thick forest, over tall mountains, etc., with seemingly no roads or trails between or around them. How do they manage to get huge poles and/or giant towers of metal to these remote locations, and furthermore, how do they connect the wires between each one? I’d guess there isn’t a moon-sized spool of cable that they simply roll from one tower to the next, so how does it all work?
I have seen it done. They just had a big spool of cable and the supports at the towers were temporarily pulley blocks. They had a couple mules pulling the cable through the rough terrain. Feed it through the next block, keep pulling, etc. It got to the point where the guys tending the spool could not see the mules. They just kept a small tension on the cable and would use a brake if it go too loose.
Note that today, in very large transmission lines, the wires are not conyinuous but are individual pieces which go from one tower to the next and are joined by short cables which hang beneath the insulators.
Minor nitpick.
It’s illegal to install such cables through Congressionally designated wilderness areas under the 1964 Wilderness Act.
sometimes chinooks or MIL-26 helicopters will sky crane entire power towers to the remote spot.
see this gallery and scroll down
I don’t think that is correct.
I have seen them installing new high-voltage lines recently, and they were using big spools with miles of wire on them. They seemed to be continuous wires for some distance.
Whihc makes sense – any joint in the wire is a potential failure point – surely they would not deliberately create such a point at every transmission tower.
I believe the wire is continuous for quite a distance, through many towers. The short cables going around the insulators are for limiting other electrical effects.
I am talking of lines where the insulators are in line with the wire and part of the catenary and the two catenaries are electrically connected with a loop below.
Look at
http://www.ktpower.com/climbsteel_220x440.jpg
http://www.randburg.com/lv/gif/lat_power_building_5.jpg
http://wwwdelivery.superstock.com/WI/223/1612/PreviewComp/SuperStock_1612R-6077.jpg
http://i.treehugger.com/images/2007/10/24/power%20lines.jpg
Panoramio is no longer available
I think the original question asked about remote areas, not areas that are protected as wilderness.
The logistics isn’t all that difficult, just fairly labor-intensive and it requires some (but less than you’d think) skill.
If you’re talking about a pristine woodland, the process would go something like this:
- A clearing crew would come down the right-of-way with equipment to cut the trees and brush. They have a set width and they basically go about it. Lots of times they’ll have machinery to help, such as tracked vehicles with what looks like a big-ass buzz saw on a hydraulic boom, among other things.
This job is usually farmed out to subcontractors.
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Then the utility contractors will go to work. They’ll have bucket trucks, auger/boom trucks, grunt laborers, linemen, poles and pole trailers, spools of wire, and the spool motor.
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The grunts, with some–limited, usually–help from the linemen, will use the augers to drill a hole in the ground. Then, they use the boom to set a pole. Once they’ve set the first pole, they move to the second, while another set of workers stays at the first pole
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At the first pole, the grunts will assemble the crossarm on the ground, then hand it up to the lineman in the bucket. He will then take it to the top of the pole and install it. He then comes back down and loads up a number of pulleys (however many conductors–individual lines–will be strung at the top of the pole.) He’ll go back up and install the pulleys at the top of the crossarm.
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The grunts will then hand the lineman the end of a nylon twine (it comes in buckets) which he takes to the top and strings through the pulley. He’ll usually tie a weight on it and let it drop back down. The grunts make sure they have enough twine to go all the way up, through the pulley, and back down, then they cut the twine. Both loose ends are then tied to a nail at the bottom of the pole, with the twine taught on the pulley. Repeat for each pulley on that crossarm.
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Once that’s repeated again and again, they’ll begin to string the conductor. What usually happens is that the spool of wire will be back at the first pole they set. The end will be tied to one end of the aforementioned twine, and the grunts will pull the other end of the twine, which lifts the wire up, strings it through the pulley, and pulls it back down. Then they muscle the wire (which is now strung through the top of one pole) to the second pole. Rinse and repeat. It’s possible to use equipment to pull the wire, but we never did…it was pure muscle, with one employee running the spool machine.
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Eventually, you get to the end of one spool. When that happens, you tie everything up and move, sort of leapfrog style, down the line, where you start again with a new spool of wire. When it comes time, the lineman goes up the bucket and splices the wire ends together (there’s a connector that looks and functions a lot like Chinese fingercuffs–you slide the ends of the wire into it, bang the shit out of it with a hammer, and the line is now spliced.)
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The lineman in the bucket goes back down the row, pulling the pulleys off the crossarm (they have a 'break" where he can take them off the wire) and replacing them with insulators, which he wires the conductor to.
On and on and on…
And it’s true that on the bigger transmission lines, they do use helicopters and/or cranes to set those huge metal poles…I’m talking more along the lines of distribution, though that can go through the boonies for a ways.