Helicopters Will Fly Over Lehigh on Thursday

Bob M October 11, 2012 at 01:26 pm

A few years back I was fly fishing for Stripers in O'Neill Forebay (Hiway 152, San Luis Res, Los Banos) and sitting in the water under the high voltage power transmission lines. I saw a helicopter fly from the south up along the power lines and it had 4 men standing on the skids outside the helicopter. At first I thought they may be shooting a movie but it flew over me, circled around and set it's skids down on the top crossbar of the nearest transmission tower. The 4 men, wearing hard hats and harnesses, stepped off with a couple of wooden boards about 7' long with hooks on both ends. As they proceeded to go to each of the strings of glass line insulators and using the wooden rods replaced each insulator string while the helicopter shuttled in new insulators and flew away with the old ones. They moved the men and wooden rods from tower to tower via the helicopter replacing every glass insulator on each tower. Looking down the endless line of transmission towers, and remembering it was a Saturday, I could only think of the expense of replacing every glass insulator on every transmission tower on every PG&E line using the helicopter and this method and what the cost of that must be! It took them about 20 minutes per tower.

Anne Ernst (Editor) October 11, 2012 at 08:51 pm

Pretty interesting story, Bob M.