April 2021

Spring in Briones

On April 23, 2021, The Brionean received a text from PG&E announcing an outage affecting 201 electric meters, a not-infrequent occurrence in Briones. These “201” outages are caused by one or both fuses blown on pole 1711 in the toney Stonehurst neighborhood just inside the comfortable urban boundary of the City of Martinez, where the McMansion dwellers sip chardonnay from glasses washed in city water, heated by natural gas piped from streets with sidewalks, while searching for serenity in streaming entertainment fed from wired broadband. More modern circuits use automated reclosers—circuit breakers on steroids—instead of these primitive fuses. Reclosers can be operated remotely and optionally programmed to retry automatically after a brief delay, typically ⅓ seconds for the first retry, the second and third retries are after longer delays. After a limited number of retries, it is usually programed to lock open. Faults that blow fuses—or open reclosers—are typically caused by vegetation contact with conductors. The resulting blast most often clears the vegetation and leaves the conductor intact.

Pole 1711 features the two fuses through which all of Briones' PG&E power runs. One or both blown fuses knocks out power to all of Briones.

There's the problem. One fuse has blown, killing the whole circuit to Briones' 201 meters.

The slender rod hanging down means the fuse is blown, and since the primary sides of the transformers are only connected to the pair of phase conductors, one open fuse kills the whole shebang.

Here's what an unblown fuse looks like, utterly calm, bathing insouciantly in an azure sky.

Have you seen this troubleman? He's the same one who changed the two blown fuses in January.

After renewing the 65-amp fuse cartridge, it is slammed back into the holder. Then the 780 kW capacity circuit is back in business. That's a little over 1000 horsepower.