I just moved to a new community with buried power lines which gave me a false sense of confidence before the remnants of Ian hit. No luck though – we still lost power last night for several hours. How does that happen? Am I more or less likely to have power go out, and if it does out, does it typically take the same amount of time to restore? Halp.
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Power line coming out of power plants are very well protected. As are the huge high voltage line towers you see running through accessways high above ground. They are up so high to insure a falling tree can’t affect them. If they did get messed up, the outage would be major.
There will be a substation somewhere that converts high voltage to lower voltage, and shares it to multiple zones. These are almost always above ground. And are the source of many outages.
Then theres the possibility that the power line is above ground anywhere between where you live and the substation.
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