Grounding is 'no joke'
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Ground is no joke... and when your office requires towers and radios - it's not a matter of IF you will ever get hit,.. but WHEN you get hit by lightning...
The PSOC - Public Safety Operations Center and PSAPs - Public Safety Answer Points generally will have a transceiver tower attached.
In the building I work in,.. There is a serious level of grounding and isolation involved. In the PSAP of my county, there is next to nothing that electrically enters the building. The radios and tower is completely isolated from the main building. Everything is grounded. Door frames, Conduit, Cable management systems, HVAC, water,... everything.
There is a running ground, or as was termed today, a HALO ground. Ground bars are 1/2" x 2" x 8" with multiple points, and 0 AWG wire all terminated to ground to protect the center(s).
That said - a storm cell passed through the city last night... And it's caused quite a bit of issue for the PSOC.
One dispatcher was on a call at the time when it happened, and the audio feed recorded her reaction - and she was taken to the hospital..
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My truck - well the headlights at least - can been seen, left side of the lot, third vehicle.
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Wow, exciting day there!
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Glad you are all right.
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@scottalanmiller said in Grounding is 'no joke':
Glad you are all right.
Same here. Had it not been for all the grounding - it would have been worse, hardware wise - and who knows what else.
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I've seen the after effects of an improperly grounded radio tower aand a lightning strike. Definitely not pretty -- especially hardware wise!
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@gjacobse We have a tower beside our house that is isolated from the house to prevent a dual-ground situation.
All cables that run into the house are completely isolated to prevent anything jumping in.
We had a client in Edmonton that had a fax modem and a fax service running on a PC. When we set it up the POTS line was grounded prior to running into the PC. Somewhere along the way something was moved around and the POTS line in from the wall got plugged in to the PC modem directly.
An active storm had a strike against the pole in the alley and sure enough besides the boom scaring the carp out of folks the PC was dead. When we opened it up the controller chip on the modem was literally blown out as was the chipset chip under the heatsink. Time for a new PC!
