My job is in utility engineering, primarily in transmission lines. Working on projects that are several miles long and expand all across a city has brings upon its own challenges. Our lines have to be designed not only with real tangible constraints such as the voltages and required clearances that go with them in mind or the tension applied to the conductor, but also constraints that have no true physical form, like property lines.

This back and forth between physical constraints and property lines makes an interesting dance of design. Your line could be perfectly suited to be built as cheap as possible for the given weather, but if a property owner says you can’t build on their land your whole design could fall apart. Now you have to account for the laws of physics and the laws of the land.

A recent instance of this happened a few weeks ago at work. A property owner wanted us to steer clear of their land, but there literally was no other way to go about it. So a compromise was made: I would set the poles just out of their property boundary, and to make sure that our conductor had a zero percent chance of ever falling onto their property I would design the poles to have arms as long as possible. Normally this is fine, but this property was wrapped along a bend in a road.

Depending on how the conductor is wired the supporting structures will either undergo a pushing or pulling force into it, which causes the moment within your pole to increase, which then means you have to build a bigger pole with a bigger foundation, which mean that your foundation might end up encroaching on somebody’s land anyways. It pushed me between a rock and a hard place. Fortunately with a lot of fine tuning I was able to get the foundations just out the property lines.

Every field of engineering has its own set of unique constraints, utility engineering’s is a dance between the fundamental laws of nature and the legal laws of the land.


Day 5

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