Point Reyes Light - October 10, 2002
A near disaster as PG&E lines collapse
By Andrew Pridgen
With a flurry, of sparks, fire, and explosions, a 12,000-volt PG&E line collapsed in Point Reyes Station at 4:30 p.m. Friday, leaving a key intersection tangled in live electrical wires.
The high-voltage lines came close to electrocuting a 17-year-old bicyclist, Leroux Prater who lives near the intersection, and did strike a car being driven by a pregnant motorist, Jennifer Sulprizio of Inverness.
However, Sulprizio and her two-year-old son in the backseat of her car were not injured because the BMW’s rubber tires prevented the electricity from grounding.
Prater, was at Greenbridge Gas and Auto when a tranformer on a pole by the air-and-water station began sparking. He and others in the area gathered – seemingly at a safe distance – to watch the sparking when numerous overhead lines criss-crossing the intersection of Highway 1 and Mesa Road fell to the ground almost simultaneously.
A strip of heavy insulation landed on the head of the youth, who threw himself from his bicycle just as a 12,000-volt line missed his head by a foot and landed on the ground where it started sparking. "That thing came so close to hitting me!" he exclaimed afterward.
As it happened, a Shoreline schoolbus was trapped by the falling lines, but only the driver was onboard and not was hurt.
Explaining what apparently occurred, PG&E spokesman Lloyd Coker and utility workers at the scene said a workman in a cherry picker had overly loosened a line uphill from the Creamery Building during a maintenance project.
The worker apparently failed to realize how much tension power poles downhill were putting on the the line, and when the line was loosened it snapped, causing crossbars to drop from the downhill poles.
PG&E workers quickly shut off power in the immediate area as they put the fallen wires back on poles.
"Since crews were already there working, all repairs were completed within an hour – by 5:25 p.m.," said Coker. "A phone line was also taken down, and we called them to send a crew to fix their line as well."
The mishap was only one of three this past week in which PG&E lines fell. The other two both occurred Saturday: one on Highway 1 in Marshall and the other at Dillon Beach and Middle roads in Tomales. Both incidents were caused by vehicles running into power poles.