…of my dad coming home from the office…
…and not leaving the house for three days.
Perhaps the greatest North Dakota blizzard of all was 43 years ago today (and tomorrow,and the next day).
This photo was taken near my hometown, Jamestown.
Yes, in North Dakota the power poles are 20-odd feet tall.
It’s “jokingly” captioned “I believe there is a train under here somewhere! “. I remember seeing newspaper photos (years after the fact, in the stacks at the library) of a Northern Pacific passenger train stuck in a drift that pretty much buried the locomotives to the roof.
I was living in a small town outside Chicago in 1967, during the “Great Chicago Snow”.
http://www.islandnet.com/~see/weather/events/chisnow1967.htm
Nobody got in or out of town for a week. The town didn’t have a grocery store – the principal authorized milk from the school distributed to the families with infants.
Thing is, it really wasn’t all that much snow. 32 inches? I’ve seen single storms drop twice times that in Minneapolis, and things were fine by the morning commute. Chicago’s problem was simple – they didn’t have snow clearing equipment.
You know, they make those electrical poles some 20-odd feet tall for a reason. You’re not supposed to get that close to them!
I hope a big gust of that famous North Dakota wind that we keep hearing about didn’t knock the guy onto the wires after the picture was taken.
You’re not supposed to get that close to them!
I doubt there was any power to them, if memory serves (and it very likely does not, but there were all sorts of outages in that storm back then).
That many wires on the pole….those aren’t power poles, they are communications/telephone lines. The railroads needed lots of wires to transmit signaling information and to control train movements. The older technology was one circuit per wire.
The insulators are also a indicator. They are not very big, so any voltage would be (relatively) low. Transmissions in the country, or down your alley for that matter, run at a higher voltage to reduce power loss caused by line resistance. Local circuits are smaller wires below the transmission lines, at lower voltage (110/220) served by pole mount transformers, which step down the voltage from the transmission lines.