Three days after they decided to send someone out again (finally), I got a call from PG&E’s RTVI hunter guy that he’d found a couple spots in the neighborhood, but unfortunately he called while I was in a meeting, so he got my voicemail. He was calling to check to see if the locations he found aligned with where I had picked up the noise myself, and strangely enough, no, they did not!
What this means is he found two more locations that I didn’t even know about.
The following night the noise was unusually bad and choppy, so I decided to go out for a walk with my Yagi and my HT; this time I found yet another location, unfortunately behind someone’s house, but where the same type of sagging insulator was used that has been implicated in several other noisy poles.
And tonight, I decided to see if I could track down what was making the occasional snapping, crackling, or popping sound, and no it wasn’t a bowl of Rice Crispies. This turned out to be another location entirely, and what’s particularly disturbing about this location is that it’s off the levee and completely surrounded by dry vegetation and people’s homes. And once again, the same type of sagging insulators are implicated, this time on two poles which are connected.
Both of these two new locations only cause trouble when the wind is blowing; there seems to be some kind of fault that is triggered by the insulators moving slightly in the wind, which I could see from the ground. I have of course relayed all of this information to PG&E. Maybe some day they’ll act on it.
This brings the grand total of problematic utility poles in my neighborhood up to 6 now, including the original one that was close by, and that’s just the ones we know about.