The 1998 ice storm was something that had not happened before. Montreal was in particularly bad shape because numerous towers for something like 2 of the 3 transmission lines going into the city collapsed under the weight of the ice (please forgive my foggy memory for the exact numbers and details).
My family in eastern Ontario was without power for 8 days in 1998, and another friend was without power for 17 days. Ontario had failed to enforce proper engineering standards for pole lines, and as a direct result of the review of standards after the '98 ice storm, ESA regulation 22/04 significantly improved standards for these systems. Regulation 22/04 wasn't fully implemented by Hydro One and Bell until 2007-2008, and one consequence of 22/04 is that the cost of installing new fibre on old pole lines increased massively at that time as permitting process went from being handshake deals to requiring detailed engineering work.
Those of us trying to deploy broadband in some areas simply cannot afford to replace every single pole in some areas as is required by modern engineering standards. I have personally encountered quite a number of class 5 - 35 foot poles with 3 phases of power on them that were installed in 1948! Survey work in the past month even found a couple of poles from 1929!!! Those poles are effectively toothpicks at this point in their lifecycle. Granted, the older poles that were treated with creosote last a heck of a lot longer than the more modern "environmentally friendly" CCA-PEG treated poles, but they're pretty small and often have glass insulators that you really don't want to be anywhere near when that pole starts swaying due to the movement of a cable lasher.
Learning about all of this telecom and electrical domain knowlegde has been kinda fun in its own way. =-)
Wow!That is very interesting, it's amazing that a pole can even survive almost 100 years of frost/defrost like that and still hold any lines. I guess considering the incredible distances involved here in Canada, keeping track of the poles and actually inspecting them is a huge challenge though. I wouldn't have thought broadband added any significant weight on the poles though!
And you are right, that storm was pretty unique because of how much ice (instead of snow) it ended up creating. But honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if we see another big grid failure soon. The network has been noticeably less reliable the past 2-3 years, and not just in my location. I've had to build a DIY UPS for my home server this year because of that (the outages have been around 7-8h each so an off the shelf UPS was not really an option if I wanted 100% uptime). Hopefully I'm wrong because electric heating is massive here.
The biggest risk when adding new fibre to existing pole lines is actually during the installation process. When new cables are lashed to communications strand, the 45 pound cable lasher causes the strand to swing back and forth quite significantly, making the tops of nearby poles swing several feet or more. As a result, insulators that are old and of certain types that may develop cracks can break off during lashing. Direct or even indirect contact with a 7.2kV or 16.8kV primary by communications workers can be deadly, and is a real risk of this kind of work.
My family in eastern Ontario was without power for 8 days in 1998, and another friend was without power for 17 days. Ontario had failed to enforce proper engineering standards for pole lines, and as a direct result of the review of standards after the '98 ice storm, ESA regulation 22/04 significantly improved standards for these systems. Regulation 22/04 wasn't fully implemented by Hydro One and Bell until 2007-2008, and one consequence of 22/04 is that the cost of installing new fibre on old pole lines increased massively at that time as permitting process went from being handshake deals to requiring detailed engineering work.
Those of us trying to deploy broadband in some areas simply cannot afford to replace every single pole in some areas as is required by modern engineering standards. I have personally encountered quite a number of class 5 - 35 foot poles with 3 phases of power on them that were installed in 1948! Survey work in the past month even found a couple of poles from 1929!!! Those poles are effectively toothpicks at this point in their lifecycle. Granted, the older poles that were treated with creosote last a heck of a lot longer than the more modern "environmentally friendly" CCA-PEG treated poles, but they're pretty small and often have glass insulators that you really don't want to be anywhere near when that pole starts swaying due to the movement of a cable lasher.
Learning about all of this telecom and electrical domain knowlegde has been kinda fun in its own way. =-)