Exploding Squirrels and Dodgy Drop Wires

Apologies for a long gap since the last post, but the reasonable summer weather has kept me away from the keyboard doing outdoorish things. Broadband has taken a bit of a backseat, but with autumn on the way, it is time to take up the cudgel again.

The second reason for lack of activity on the blog was because concerns here in Winterbourne Stoke shifted a little because of a nasty "near-miss" accident involving the Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE) electricity supply to the village. You may recall that our broadband problems started shortly after SSE replaced some of the telegraph poles around the village.

It was all a bit half-hearted and dodgy poles in difficult situations were left. It took us quite a while to establish who (SSE or BT) owned which pole, and who to complain to.

The story, so far, is kind of funny in a perverse sort of way. But it, so easily, have had an horrific outcome. As it is, no-one has been killed yet. Our story ends with another BT infrastructure issue that needs resolution - before there is another accident.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin:

Back in June, one of our many local squirrels took a short-cut through my neighbours garden to get back to the woods. Off he went, hippity-hop, hippity-hop, as squirrels tend to do, and found a nice power pole with an 11 thousand volt transformer on it. Our squirrel was not the most intelligent of its kind in the world, but he was the brightest - at least for the brief fraction of a second when he short-circuited the transformer.

A loud BANG!, a flash of light and a small mushroom cloud - no power in the village - and a squirrel-shaped chunk of charcoal was left perched on top of the transformer. Of course, the electricity board came rushing out and took a look, reset the power and discovered that the small explosion had damaged the transformer and it was leaking oil.

Drip-drip - the oil both insulates the transformer and cools it - drip-drip.

Drip-drip - of course, knowing the coolant was leaking, the electricity board did...


...absolutely nothing. The neighbour, in whose garden the transformer was situated, reported the leak - twice. But to no avail.

Well, I suppose Winterbourne Stoke is only a small village. New transformer's are probably very expensive and the cost of a new one is probably going to take years to recover from such a small customer base...

Drip-drip - Well, the weather got warmer and the predictable happened. About a month after the squirrel became a squirrel toasty, there was a whoosh, a loud bang and a fireball erupting into the sky (the photo shows the smoke plume a minute or two later), with flaming oil raining into my neighbour's garden - over his shed, his motor-cycle, his lawn mower, his car...

...close to the spot where he and his wife can often be found on a Sunday, tending the garden, hanging out the washing, playing with the dog.

I should say at this point, my neighbour is a paraplegic, the motorcycle specially built to accommodate his wheel chair...

...and living in the middle of nowhere it took the fire-brigade over 20 minutes to arrive. When they did, an outbuilding joined to the house had just caught fire and the house would have followed soon after.

No-one hurt, tens of thousands of pounds worth of damage done - we were really lucky! If it had happened at night, it can take over 10 minutes to get my neighbour out of bed with a hoist. If the wind had been blowing from its normal direction the flames would have blown towards the house much sooner. It could have been a disaster - and now, it seems, an inquiry is underway.

I don't think anyone here is overly confident that the inquiry will be rigorous, or that appropriate lessons will be learned. It seems that Scottish and Southern Energy may have believed that there was minimal damage to property, that the traumatised householders suffered no ill effects and that had the worst happened, someone might have needed first aid treatment! Hmmm, I suspect even partial immolation in burning transformer oil might require something a little more substantial than first aid! But we were lucky - very lucky.

Downplaying the incident may be why we haven't seen any investigator's from HSE or DECC around the village. A risky business though, as someone might notice.

So - why is this of interest to BT? Well, the next pole along from the transformer is the drop-pole in my other neighbour's garden that BT share with Southern Electric. I've mentioned it to BT several times over the last 2 years as the base of the pole was rotted-out and it was being held up by the power lines. It was so rotten, it moved and tore the drop-wire from another neighbour's roof. To be fair, BT engineers told us they had reported the pole to Scottish and Southern Energy and been told the job was in hand - on more than one occasion.

When the transformer pole was burning, we were concerned that the drop-pole could fall too and it was likely to land on the roof of the home of another disabled villager, or, my immediate neighbour's new car - her pride and joy. No doubt half the village would have lost phones had this happened - but we were lucky.

Well, after 3 weeks, we are now all back on mains power. The electricity board have attached their cables to a brand new pole, the transformer re-sited outside the main village, but BT couldn't send anyone out to remove the drop-wires, despite a couple of weeks warning that the pole was to be replaced. Well, Scottish and Southern realised that simply leaving things as they were was a non-starter, so they wired the old, rotting, pole to the new one for a bit of support.

I guess we will just have to keep our fingers crossed that BT will come out and move the dropwires very soon. The electricity board engineer sucked his teeth a lot as he left. He didn't seem overly confident that the old pole would stay up much longer. We've mentioned it to BT and await developments.

As I said at the start, Autumn is coming. No doubt we'll have a few windy days. I hope that the pole stays up. Well, if I don't update the blog pretty quickly, you'll know what has happened!