Car Pole

I've got a first cousin, twice removed, who wrecked his car along Franklin Blvd. sometime in the 1960s. Smashed into a power pole (please don't call them telephone poles...they are almost always power poles owned by power companies who lease the underbuilds to the phone companies.) And apparently our cousin Wally Laursen caused a big enough SMUD outage to warrant a Sacramento Bee story the next day.

Your author is not immune to car-pole accidents, as we call them in our industry. On December 13th, 1986 your author smashed into a 69kV feeder on Fair Oaks Blvd. near the intersection of San Juan. The only reason I know that date is because I actually found the record in the SMUD logs! We were clearing old documents to be archived to Iron Mountain and I took a bit of time to find my accident.

Fascinating! 4:14 in the morning I hit the pole in a blue Toyota truck having fallen asleep driving home. 7,344 customers affected for 21 minutes. SMUD operates their 69kV system radially, meaning the loss of a feeder results in the wholesale loss of customer load until such time as operations either clears the fault or picks up the load on adjacent feeders. I created a B-C phase to phase fault when I smashed into the pole and the phase conductors galloped and touched.

I never knew about the outage I caused until this week. I was in the emergency room with a lacerated tongue and mom's wrath . My stepdad kept on and on about how he had just spent $300 bucks to get the truck's brakes done. I had no idea I caused a few hundred alarm clocks to reset to 00:00, how many hundreds were late for church on the 14th...what a rebel I was!