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LIRR outage blamed on bare cable
The majority of overhead power lines are bare wire. Not sure why it has suddenly become a problem.
It wasn’t an overhead power line…and those are technically cables and not wire.
I see picky responses here. Yes a bare copper wire can be a signal wire and since it comes up and out of a signal bungalow it is an aerial cable. It can be a low voltage signal cable and if you ground it out then the signal does not get through. Take it from an old Telephone man that has chased all sorts of signalling on straight copper wire you can have 130 volts on it with Dc supperimposed on top of it. Real pain in the neck to chase partial grounding troubles that will not trip alarms or breakers but will surpress signals enough so it does not work.
could have been a bad pin insulator with a crack in it allowing the current to flow to the metal pin and to ground. We still have it happen now and then on the old PRR/NEC signal line. All it takes is a tree to bounce the line or arm or high winds to stress crack a 50-70 yr old insulator.
38 yrs in the ET dept.