Classic Video of Galloping Conductors
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- Опубліковано 25 тра 2019
- This is a re-post of a few classic videos on galloping and vibrations of transmission lines I've collected in my 25 years working in this field. It's important to note that I've not filmed them nor do I claim ownership. All credit goes to the original authors or companies mentioned.
- Наука та технологія
Spent 39 years in power industry and never heard of this in such magnitude! Scary stuff!!
I suspect that the winds have to be blowing in such a way that the oscillation is near a resonant frequency of the lines. It's probably like the famed Tacoma-Narrows bridge collapse, you know? Given your 39 years, I'm curious about what you have heard of. Intuitively, this struck me as a rare event, but I don't actually know.
@@bsadewitz The video reminded me of the Erasmus bridge in Rotterdam (the Netherlands). The cable-stayed portion of the deck would swing during winds of 6 Beaufort or more and if rainwater was flowing along the cables. The water changed the cables' aerodynamic properties just enough to induce oscillations. The issue was solved by adding 2 hydraulic dampers to each cable.
combination of ice buildup and wind.
my heart goes out to tower 4ZP105
What the hell is whispered at the 29-31 second mark? "You're so soft electric hydrogen?" Makes perfect sense. funny.
Some sort of weird electrical fettish wank going on in the background
@@MrRedeyedJedi 😆😆😆
this is hilarious (0:29)
@YAKUMO RAN lmaoo
To me it also sounded liked the camera operator counting softly to time the zoom :P .
Been a sparky for 20+ years and I'm more than happy on the 230/415v thank you very much, sod all that 300/400kv bollocks.....and what I do, it's normally a bit warmer.
Never, I repeat never go ahead with a plan before asking Jim what he thinks.
It's dead Jim.
I'm a doctor, not a lines repairman.
I'm a doctor, not a high qualified sparky.
Jim Exton was the 1st Eng OHL in the Penwortham based northern district of the now National Grid Company or what was then the CEGB. He was a great guy to work for and was well respected by all of his line gang and those of the Daines line gang AKA Central District, who, where also invited to the party to repair the damage. Those were happy days signed John Hatton of the Daines Line Gang
This is a fascinating video, thank you for bringing this to the people.
A local wedding video recorder guy was recruited to do the filming at very short notice. RIP all the guys who are no longer with us
An arc-cellent video. ♡ T.E.N.
These guys are SAINTS to ensure electricity now so essential to life is very rarely interrupted. We COULD NOT live without it now. We are UTTERLY dependant on it and i humbly bow to to ALL involved in its production and distribution
I’m pretty sure that winter was the time that we had a lot of snow in Kent, London and the south east of the U.K., and we had storms almost continuously that winter with cold followed by snow.
Amazing to see at the end the workers going under the tower with falling ice wearing a woolly bobble hat for PPE! How times have thankfully changed! Fantastic footage, thank you for posting.
This is a valuable demonstration of weather causing damage to power lines. I've heard of this phenomenon but this is the first time I've seen it. Awesome historical data. Great video...thumbs up.
Agreed. Thumbs up to the original author. This is a repost of others fantastic work.
Great stuff, lucky it's not too common. Love the pre UA-cam era video! I was living in Yorkshire in 1986 and can attest to the nippy winter when we had to put an actual coat on in winter for once, like that German military parka the linesman was wearing.
Well, I learned something new. Thanks very much
Daniel Wilten
Incredible to see that kind of load on the tower and insulator strings. Testament to the design that the line stayed up.
Well, it did not really...
Those falling chunks of ice would kill it it hit anyone. Especially seeing as most of them didn't have hard hats on.
I don't think I heard the term PPE until the mid 90s!
Fascinating! Thanks for sharing this.
I've been up there in quite some conditions but never seen them galloping like that. The weather must have been something special back then.
This is a great analysis video for those that have to work on them.
Incredible stuff. One might almost expect Thunderbirds to appear on the scene!
Wow pretty crazy stuff. I remember seeing fibre optic lines doing this, not really damaging or anything but it was interesting that it must have hit the right resonance and it was basically like a skipping rope between two poles, and all the other spans were not moving, it was rather interesting to see it doing it to just one span.
Like a huge double-dutch! Jump in!
Daniel Wilten
damn that must have been some spectacular phase to phase arcing when the line tripped out initially
At 400kv, I bet the boom was heard from miles. It probably sounded like thunder from the distance.
Somehow, the engineers managed to find a conductor configuration which created lift in windy conditions. The wind is not that strong, but the conductors are moving considerably. Very reminiscent of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, aka Galloping Gertie.
It's not the configuration itself that is causing the problem. It's the build-up of ice on the conductors that gives them a wing-like shape, creating a huge amount of lift if the wind comes from the right angle. This same problem occured in the northern part of the Netherlands at the beginning of January 2016 and caused lights to flicker at random intervals nationwide as lines shorted. There was a shitty video on Twitter somewhere with the arcs being drawn between the conductors. Here's a video that doesn't show the arcs, but does show the 'line-dancing' as we call it in the Netherlands. ua-cam.com/video/1TYXjkxVUUg/v-deo.html
The same lines are used all over the UK and are not normally problematic. It was the combination of ice build up and high winds that caused the issued, not the conductor arrangment alone.
Galloping is perhaps the only thing that didn't go wrong on the Texas gris this awful week where millions were without power in sub-freezing temperatures for days on end.
Geez that was scary! Those guys must have balls of steel to go anywhere near those towers while they were twisting and flailing like that! The noise is hellish! Being from Bradford myself I know exactly where these towers are... It does get really windy up on the moors. My dad has told me stories about the winter of '86 and how much snow and ice there was. Now I can see what he meant! I'm impresed the towers survived this much punishment and are still standing today. Mother nature can be pretty brutal at times.
You know approximately how far away they are from those towers, then? One of my first thoughts watching this was, "How are they just standing there?!?" Then I thought about how I'm probably not judging the distance accurately, and wished that I could ask someone familiar with the area about it. Lo and behold ... ;-)
@@bsadewitz they're at least a 1/2 mile closer than I would have been!
Anyone who thinks pylons are boring is wrong❤️😊🇬🇧
True
Agree
They are classic Electricity Generating Board type double circuit lattice towers. 275-kV Great Britain. Very interesting to see British tribulations with conductor fatigue.
L6, 400kv
Video clearly states 132kV
@@tommiballs They are well over-insulated for 132-kV. Spacings and conductor arrangement figure that these structures were originally built for a higher voltage.
@@tommiballs Its a 400kv single circuit from Eggborough power station to Padiham near Burnley. And a 275kv single circuit from Bradford West to Rochdale. I can see these towers from my house, so I know exactly what they are and where they go. Driven past them countless times.
Scary when that conductor detached itself from the insulator I wonder if it touched the tower and short circuited they must have cut the power by the time these guys arrived
Near the beginning of the video they mention how the line had already tripped off before they came to investigate. That is what brought them out to see what happened.
15.30 we had to do everything of a ladder, obviously for safety !! ... next Marvel super hero action figure. What a legend. Health and safety executives .... watch and learn son, watch and learn !!
The moment when the system goes offline and you get to the site to see that surrealist scene.
Very nice!
I get genuinely scared when those lines are dancing
In the days before they analysed resonance effect with wind speed
great information...
I’ve seen this on distribution flat construction July 1974 Gloucester Va
Nostalgic reencounter
More like hmmm,That’s something you don’t see everyday
Stunning
im in windy storm watching this
Thanks for posting this! It's amazing how much abuse these huge structures took. How did they avoid galloping in future?
I beleive most of this line is now twin conductor bundles instead of quads, with a modified arrangement and different design of spacers.
Rotated twin and then triple conductors from the L6 D90 at Blackstone Edge.
They stoped galloping after this they fixed the cables or replaced it or smth diff
Remember Galloping Gerdy bridge over the Tacoma Narrows?
First thing I thought of when watching this video!
@@mongolikechewchew2475 Lol, me too. I have been fascinated by that bridge collapse since childhood. I even thought to myself, "oh, so is galloping a word that is used for this phenomenon in general?" If it is, I didn't know thar.
@@bsadewitz Galloping might be a technical term amongst engineers.
Never seen anything as bad as that before. That is something else. Dangerous, not only from wires and steel work, but from falling ice. I would loved to have been there though, bit of excitement, but very dangerous!!
Never heard of this phenomenon before... 🤔
I have seen it before, but nothing like that, but it is the Quad conductors that start oscillating in the wind. Funny though, it is always the Quad ones the really get going, single wires just swing and bounce a bit. Mostly when they get snow and ice build up. You can imaging the build up on a quad line, once ice builds up it acts like a sail and the extra weight makes them bounce and away it goes.
Not even "Galloping Gertie" the Tacoma Narrows suspension bridge? Galloping in a steady wind brought that whole bridge down! The wind doesn't have to be strong. Just steady at the right speed & resonance does the rest!
@@BoB4jjjjs Thanks for the explanation, well said.
I've always noticed sometimes you see powerline conductors to the side.
A north easterly wind at 15 - 42kts. The tech was available to have conducted wind testing of the design, the wind direction for that season is common. The quoted wind speed is not excessive, it was the resonant frequency that caused the galloping. The fact that the towers remained standing gives credit to their design. My theory is that if the wind direction had been off by say 10 degrees, or the wind speed been above the quoted, then perhaps the galloping may not have occurred. But that is only my un -calculated theory.....
what is the occurence of such severe events ?
Christ. I now why our electricity is so expensive. I will think of this video and the guys in it EVERYTIME i put my meagre 2.2 kilowatt kettle on.
I was in Germany in 86. All of Northern Europe was plunged into artic conditions that winter.
"artic conditions" Ha ha ha. Good one. All of Europe with 40 to 60 below Zero. Ha ha ha.
"We walked 20 km through two meters of snow barefoot to get to school." Yea bud.
@@deconteesawyer5758 For European people it’s an apt description. And the windchill of the moors is considerable, and could equal the temperatures of the Arctic in some cases. We might not be frozen Canada, but it’s cold enough for a mostly temperate country just coming out of a cold spell, and before the global warming really kicked in and changed the weather especially for the U.K.
@@englishruraldoggynerd I've always wondered if Englishmen really do keep a stiff upper lip on the Moors when they find themselves being blown with a chill wind on their backsides..
The stresses on everything must have been enormous. Huge amount of damage done.
Im shocked the corner towers did not come down.
11:25 🔩🔩🔩🔩🔩🔩🔩🔩🔩
🕳🕳🕳🕳🕳🕳🕳🕳🕳👀
All the bolts at a particular tower brace have sheared off, you can see all the empty bolt holes. That’s the most interesting part I saw. Pretty crazy, I’ve never seen more than 1 bolt shear off anything before (generally speaking, not specific to electrical power).
16:10 Indoors, he reviews a collection of damaged parts like sheared bolts.
Why is this comment getting deleted within 15 seconds? This is the 3rd time I posted it. I can’t imagine anything offensive about my comment??
It could be an automated deletion from the amount of emojis you used. Channels are getting strikes for commentors emoji "spamming".
Try posting with only 1 or 2 maximum.
I've seen people lose their accounts over it!
This morning I learned why a 1900ft tv tower collasped. A U bolt had unapproved bolt used in hoisting a 6 ton antenna. Five dead, 1900 ft of mangled steel . Wow, what a Sunday on youtube.
Looks like the power was shut off on that line before the video was recorded.
How is this problem solved?
10:29 I'd run like hell if I saw that.
I think in the US We put boxes that are set on point on the lines to help solve this problem.
3:48 needs googly eyes!
Impressive.
All of the images are too fuzzy for me to make out if high frequency dampers were in use where the galloping was so bad. As for low frequencies, the attachment impedance is the only thing that can think of that can effect that. Ron W4BIN (2022)
Good thing this line was not energised during this.
How strong does the wind have to be to make the isolators _wobble_ like that?! The line passes behind our house and even in gale force winds you I've only ever seen them just tilt (like 5:20 but about 2/3 of the deflection at the most) and resettle once the wind has calmed.
Also, anyone know how long the 400kV isolators are? I've seen line workers on a lower voltage and those were up to the lineman's neck, relative to him appearing to stand on the wires.
It's probably not the wind itself that makes them wobble, but the galloping conductors that start to make them wobble. It's a bit of a whiplash effect on the isolators, which eventually will make them move. I stood next to a 400 kV isolator-chain one in a musuem in Germany. It's just so weird to see how big it is when you can stand next to it. I believe it was something like 4,5 meter...
They are about 16ft long on the 400kv lines.
Holy shit, that is terrifying.
almost looks like Alan Partridge narrating...
Some very distinct Lancashire accents
I love transmission lines!
It’s like witnessing a train wreck in slow motion
A strange secondary resonance from the alternating current.
The 60 htz energy attracted another energy entity.
Was there a permanent solution to this problem?
Yes, they redid some lines, replaced the spacers and changed it from a four line format to a double one. Some steel work needed replacement too.
You can see them today so they fixed it! 😷👍🏻
@@englishruraldoggynerd Thanks
Did he say 40 miles?
Indeed, he did. For a moment, I wondered what exactly I was about to see ... ;-)
When we used to have actual heavy snow in winter.
I thought that was what I was shoveling this past winter
Scary crazy
17:20 Seeing that quadruple bundle of almost 500mm² ACSR wires twisted because of mechanical stress is brutal.
If the fault relay hadn't tripped, we would have a 2000 amp electric arc roaring through the air. That said, vintage British 400kV pylons are cooler than modern ones.
Any connection to Galloping Gertie?
Nope. Galloping Gertie is the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington state that collapsed in 1940.
Yes, same cause. If you heard the wind was only 22mph blowing through the cables here & the Tacoma Narrows bridge it was a medium strength wind.
It's the speed, it's steadiness and the resonant frequency of the structure that will bring these things down.
The St.Paul's pedestrian footbridge over the Thames had to be strengthened because being a suspension bridge it moved slightly as people walked over it. As the bridge's resonant frequency was close to walking pace the people walking on the bridge naturally fell into step with the movement.
This started a positive feedback loop & the oscillation would grow in amplitude. People came just to walk on the galloping bridge for fun.
They closed it & damped out the oscillations (Boo!). It cost millions!
But that was just human footsteps. Not a lot of energy. It's just when & how it's applied, the natural resonant frequency of the structure & if there's anything to damp it out.
“High altitude”
“...about 390 meters...”
Lol. Greetings from 2438 meters.
I'm not getting that talking point either. Thinking the high tension transmission line that crosses over Mt Lofty near home, that might be higher than 600 metres.
@@gorillaau i was just poking fun at my british cousins for thinking they have altitude. It’s not all that uncommon for them to do so, but i suppose it’s all about perspective and familiarity. Living in colorado, my house sits at 8000 feet. Pikes peak which is an hour’s drive away is 14,115 feet/4302m. So perspective is important lol. I imagine that in the uk, 390m is some fairly respectable elevation.
I had no idea wtf mt lofty was so i admittedly had to google it and yep, looks like 727 meters. How does that compare with the rest of straya? Never been there and always appreciate perspectives (of course).
@@AUXdrone Sorry for using a local landmark. My Lofty, South Australia is not the tallest mountain in Australia but it does have a high voltage line that crosses it at approximately right angles, no oblique, gentle rise cheats!
The highest mountain in Australia is Mount Kosciuszko, New South Wales, at 2,228 metres or 7,310 feet above sea level. Yes, every peak is relative to another example.
@@gorillaau no apologies needed, i often lack tact and the intonation i would use while speaking often gets lost in text form. I was highlighting my ignorance to aussie geography, and not insinuating any shortcoming on your end.
What matters is that we exchanged useless but interesting information from opposite sides of the planet, in mere moments, and we’re better off for it. Hopefully we’ll get those ideal trivia questions at some point and blow everyone’s mind at how cultured and knowledgable we are...well at least maybe i can briefly give the impression that i’m cultured and knowledgable. Hah!
@@AUXdrone No worries. Have a good weekend (getting near enough to it over here)
Why do they choose to use the term galloping instead of oscillating?
more poetic
It’s a Yorkshire thing I think. And galloping was in the common lexicon then too. Oscillation was a university word that man. Aye.
@@englishruraldoggynerd I would have expected engineers to use a university term. But ok. Thank you for clarifying.
Galloping is very much a technical term for oscillation.
I have three dictionaries, all of which include the idea of "speedy, rapid progression"... but the word or idea of any kind of oscillation, or back and forth, is not mentioned. So I'm guessing if galloping is a technical term, they are not referring to the physical lines themselves but rather the kinetic energy moving through them.
Imagine walking under them to go home. You'd be calling a taxi!
Blimey. Have never witnessed anything as bad as that.
Did he use miles and not km?
This is the North of England. In the UK, we tend to use statute miles rather than kilometres.
Yes. Because it’s in the U.K. and we never changed to Km!
Is this phenomenon still an issue today?
No, part of the line is now a staggered twin configuration and the rest triple configuration 👍🏻👍🏻
Thats quite scary, watching those towers sway.
Your first
@@hollowaychris77 ^_^
I wasn't yet born then but it is scary to watch!
I've never heard of galloping conductors, and with a 240p resolution video recording a rain+windstorm, I'm sure I still haven't seen them yet. Is the phenomenon just the damaging effects of wind on the towers & lines?
It looks like some of those towers were being held up by the lines, not the other way around.
In a way, they are.... The suspension pylons (they are the ones with the vertical insulators) are partially supported by the weight and tension of the conductors. They are reliant on the conductors being evenly balanced across the structure and they are always configured symmetrically. If a pylon fell the weight/tension loss of the conductors can pull the adjoining pylons over! The pylons that are self supporting are the tension and termination pylons (you can spot these because the insulators are more horizontal and the conductors branch off at different angles).
@@______1799 Indeed. And it's something of a marvel that they support so much weight on their neighbors that they're still standing even as they're disintegrating.
@@agvulpine it's all very clever stuff :) i have always been fascinated by them since i was a kid, growing up we had a pylon at the end of our road, in the 90s they took it down. I watched them unthreading the wires very carefully - using a rope tied to the ends of each conductor (they then could allow the rope to just sag and drop as it was lighter then the conductor wire and less strain on the pylon). If only i had my smart phone back then i could of filmed it and posted it here!
Wait, I just liked and now this video has EXACTLY 1.6K likes (1,600 likes)!!
Charlie Ford? I thought he said Chandlers Ford?
Ee ba gum!
Its the one and only time this has ever happened on L6 towers with quad conductors thank god,or i will be repairing it .
ah yes..
sounds like the uk and the towers looks like european style ones
Yes, it’s in the U.K. in Yorkshire which is a county just over two thirds of the way up to Scotland.
That's why all lines (power, phone, cable tv, internet) should be underground.
Would you be prepared to pay x10 more for your electricity to support that?
No.
It becomes less feasible as voltage increases. No need for insulation when you hang the wires in the air, other than the points of support. It's one thing to bury single digit kV lines.
The Brooklyn Nine-Nine
Is this Texas??
Nope, UK , 1st Feb 1986.
Yorkshire, England (UK)
It appears that there is not enough slack in those lines. A guitar string will vibrate if strummed.
Shaky as that was and being that close under? Balls.
WERE ARE THEY
"Conditions are awful"
The Broke Power Line's hehaho
Electrons get sea sickness.
Železo na železo nemá logiku
I'm gonna guess that you are a Sagittarius.
I wish the video quality wasn't so awful.
Gotta love the 80's! The camera is probably the size of a smart car! 🤣😅
Yes if only everyone had smartphones back in 1986...
@@soundseeker63 oh, the craziness I'm glad didn't get memorialized in the 70s-80s 😆
That’s dangerous so It can break the wires
@18:51 You _know_ conditions are bad in the UK when "access is not possible by Land Rover"! LOL
And I am fairly sure that the Russians, Canadians, and Alaskans would have something to say about that tracked vehicle being the "only" vehicle that can operate in what appears to be less than 6" of snow.
That ain't good.
Lot more Towers needed then simple
The effect has been massively reduced by replacing twin and quad ACSR with single AAAC. The aerofoil effect during icing events is much smaller. Since most 60s and 70s ACSR life expired in the early 2000s this has been largely completed.