Tag: QRM

A little over two weeks ago, I fractured my humerus in a cycling accident, and since that time I’ve been doing a lot of walking to try to minimize how much weight I put on while I’m stuck in a sling and unable to run, bike, or swim.  So it happened on Tuesday after I got my sutures removed downtown that I decided to walk home (about 1.5 miles).

As I was nearing home, I heard a familiar sound: the sound of arcing 60Hz power.  I looked around, and sure enough, I was standing underneath a PG&E power pole.  It was arcing so loudly I could hear it over the traffic of the nearby 101 freeway.

Because arcing is a dangerous condition, I noted the address and pole number, and called it in to PG&E’s emergency line.  They promised to send someone out to check on it.  If indeed they did send anyone out, they did nothing.  I went back over to the same pole yesterday, this time armed with my handheld Yagi and my HT, and confirmed both that the pole is still arcing, and that the arcing is definitely causing RFI.

I called it in to my PG&E “customer relations” specialist, who told me that the department responsible for investigating this kind of thing has been working on changing their processes so they don’t just ignore reports of arcing and RFI for months, but rather do something about them instead.  We’ll see.  I expect this pole to still be arcing two months from now, as is their usual custom.

It has now been 142 days since my initial reports of really bad RFI in my neighborhood to PG&E, and though they have fixed a few of the problematic poles, they still haven’t fixed them all.  When you hear PG&E talking a big game about all the safety inspections they’re performing, know that it’s performative BS.  If they really cared about powerline safety, they wouldn’t wait two months to investigate any report of RFI or power pole arcing.

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.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that after insisting I open a new case for the secondary source of QRM from PG&E, nothing further has been done.  I opened that case, as requested, back on May 16, and the QRM continues to follow a fairly predictable pattern, so much so that I can say with pretty high confidence that someone will hear it around 8 AM, 2 PM, and 8 PM most every day, more when it’s hot and dry.

A few things have happened though.  Last week PG&E finally responded to the CPUC regarding my original complaint that they were dragging their heels and not doing their job to ensure their equipment was maintained properly and safely.  I know it’ll come as a tremendous shock that PG&E misrepresented or omitted key facts in their response to the CPUC.  Naturally I couldn’t allow a factual misrepresentation in their response stand, so I took advantage of the CPUC’s “one and only one opportunity” (how they put it) to set the record straight.

(You read that right: the CPUC will only allow you to respond once after the utility sends their response, and they warn you that unless you provide them with some new and compelling evidence, they’ll kick you to the curb.  They’re not even vaguely nice about it.)

I corrected the record thusly:

• My initial trouble report was made to PG&E on March 12.
• PG&E assigned someone to work on this case only AFTER my informal complaint to the CPUC was forwarded to them on April 12. Until that point, they had completely ignored my trouble report.  My first contact from PG&E regarding my case was on April 16, and it still took them almost 30 days, until May 9, to assign someone to look into a safety issue that could have started a fire.  “Complain to the CPUC just to get PG&E’s attention” is not a scaleable process.
  
• Upon assigning telecom techs to the issue, PG&E found exactly what I said they would find, exactly where I said they would find it: high-voltage power was arcing across a failing insulator a short distance from our house.
• The problem was severe enough that their techs told me they could actually hear the arcing when standing below the pole. This is rather different from PG&E’s initial characterization that there was nothing wrong.
• On May 14, PG&E replaced failing insulators on the pole in question.  There is no dispute that PG&E equipment WAS at fault.  It took them more than 60 days from my initial problem report to get to this point.
• However, a problem is still unresolved and threatens safety: there remains a secondary source of interference of exactly the same type, apparently originating within the Poplar substation (based on radio direction-finding I’ve undertaken on my own time and at my own expense).
• PG&E insisted that I open a NEW case for the secondary source of interference, which persists in an unresolved state to this day.  The new case number is [redacted], opened on May 16.  It has not been addressed at all.
• Given the interference is of exactly the same type, it is reasonable to suspect the cause is likely similar: high voltage electrical arcing, the type which can start fires, and which has started fires in the past.
• There remains a threat to public safety any time PG&E’s infrastructure is experiencing electrical arcing.  PG&E should not be ignoring these early warning signs.

The CPUC took about a week to respond, and when they finally did, they seemed to accept my “new evidence” and forwarded it on to PG&E.

The very next day someone from PG&E actually showed up at my door to ask about the issue; I explained that it’s been an ongoing problem for well over 100 days now (112 days when he turned up), that it’s a 120 pulse-per-second interference that appears to be originating at the nearby substation, and that it is possible to discern it now that the nearby pole has been fixed.  He indicated that he’d arrange to have the telecom guys come out again and hunt for the source of interference.

We’re now up to 117 days since my original case was opened, and 52 days since my most recent case was opened regarding the substation QRM source.

To an outside observer, it appears that PG&E’s policy is to ignore these problems entirely for at least 2 months before taking any action, and I have no idea if they’d have ever taken action at all if I hadn’t opened a complaint with the CPUC.  Even after a CPUC complaint, it can still take 3 weeks before someone is finally scheduled to come out and hunt for the arcing.  These data fly in the face of PG&E’s ongoing PR effort in which they want to appear as though they place a high priority on safety.

If they really cared about safety, and someone was telling them they had equipment that was arcing near a field full of dry grass, you’d sure think they’d put a priority on finding the source and fixing it as quickly as possible.

Fixing problems costs money, though, and things that cost money cut into profits.  For-profit corporations will never do the right thing voluntarily if the right thing costs them money.  They can only be forced to do so by a regulatory body.