San Antonio firefighters were extremely busy on Monday morning, dealing with weather-related electrical fires.– San Antonio firefighters were extremely busy on Monday morning, dealing with weather-related electrical fires.
Nearly 30 electrical fires were reported between 4:30 a.m. and 10 a.m. on the San Antonio Fire Department’s website and all of them were the tops of electrical poles catching fire -- some causing downed power lines or transformers blowing.
“Let us come out and check it out first,” Olmo said. “Let’s be safe, please stay back. Those power lines could fall at any time. If that happens, just give us a call. We’ll come right out we promise, it’s been a little busy this morning, but we’ll make it out there.”“We have our crews out working quickly and safely to restore outages. We have cut them almost in half in just the past hour and we will continue restoration efforts until all of our customers are restored.
After a long period of dry weather, light rain/humidity mixed with dirt/dust buildup on insulators can cause electricity to ‘track’ over. This can lead to a pole fire, which our crews have seen as shown below.