Indiana Crash Report for Electrical Lines

Couldn't dropping your trailer a mile away (the thing that actually brought down the lines) be considered tampering with evidence?

 

In Ms, I know from personal experience, if you pull a wire or pole down the power company will bill you directly for repairs if you are implicated. They will attach it to your light bill and discontinue service if not paid. If you are protected by insurance, it’s your responsibility to be reimbursed as they don’t have a relation with insurance providers.

 

I would report incident to the insurance carrier. Let them handle it. I've took a few wires down while hauling oversize. Even with higher-than-normal loads. Low wires with or without permit, is responsibility of utility company.

 

I had a load that I was 15 tall with, I was on route also. Somewhere in northeast North Carolina, I took down a line and shattered 2 poles. It was a fiber optic line or something.

NC highway patrol and the local sheriff came out, they never even measured me or anything to be certain I was as tall as I said I was. The sheriff said that the utility company had been doing work right there and his guess and mine "let the lines sag".

To this day, ive never heard anything about it. this was about 6 years ago....

 

I really don’t know. To be clear my experience with them was several years ago during harvest i hung a single wire in the middle of a three hundred acre field with a combine auger, and pulled a pole couple hundred yards away down. Came out to make repair, got my name and such and I got a bill in the mail from Arkansas demanding payment. Had to get farm owners insurance involved and they wrote farmer a check for it.
Several months ago caught a ground wire while tailgating rock. Property owner told me power company came out after I had left wanting to know information of who pulled it down. He said they have to pay for repairs and got a real attitude when he played dumb about knowing who delivered the rock. Foreman for company I drive for, broke a guy wire with an excavator on a construction job recently, and they made company pay for it to be replaced. Kicker is it was never replaced. I don’t know personally how they would act about a wire pulled down above a roadway or for out of state resident but they are unyielding to a resident for certain.

 

I knocked down some wires somewhere in Iowa many many years ago, and like everyone else, I told the guy whos house it was the wires were too low. Not my fault. Never heard from them again.

 

Look, I make this simple for you.

Stop worrying.

If you are of legal height (13' 6"), and this was not a restricted road, then you can't be held liable for the damage.

Except for utility repairs, which are properly posted at the beginning of the road where low-hanging wires could happen, and they still have to post about it.

That said, if you pull the lines down, and legal height, this is on the pole owners and the company that is sharing the services of the pole --->> not you.

The states - ALL OF THEM - abide by the same NEC/NESC standards, no exceptions.

There are two, one for power lines and one for everything else.

The power line standard is NEC Section 230.24(B)(4), which sets the power lines a minimum of 18 feet from the road surface.

The other is the National Electrical Safety Code (NESC) Article 800 and Article 820, which has a set standard of a minimum 15' 5" from the road surface.

Again, this is in ALL STATES with no exception.

This happens ALL the time, so the pole owners (sometimes that is the city/county or power company) have no means to recover damages. The homeowner has insurance, so they have to deal with that and can sue the pole owner over the damage but not you.

 

Judging by the age of the house, the power mast is way too low. The building code changes but you only have to comply when making changes to your home. The mast to the meter needs to be higher than the minimum wire clearance.
They usually need to exceed the roof line to be compliant in smaller homes