An incident occured in this part of the country, last month, where a number of electricity customers lost their supply: -
At 20:34 on 23/5/15 alarms were received from ............ along with fault
passage indication from .............. Substation
Report then received at 21:04 of a Hot Ait Balloon strike on an 11,000V overhead line near Fellside Sth Transformer pole. The damage was within 150ft of a 33,000V line
The circuit was made dead via remote control at 21:07 affecting 344
customers
There was no one on site when staff arrived and the balloon had been
removed
The line was later repaired and supplies restored
The repairs took well into the next day and involved maintaining supply by generators.
But the sheer risk to the balloon crew of packing up without any assurance the situation was safe is absolutely amazing.
In this part of the world we get usually one or two aviation related incidents a year where contact is made. Usually balloons or hang gliders, fortunately there have been no deaths as yet!
A case of not keeping a look-out on what is going on at ground level?