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Submitted By -Insulator failed
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Today 6/9/97 we had a insulator fail in a Substation. The crew was in the process of changing the switch handle and under frequency control switch in the breaker. Approx. 15 feet up and 4 feet out a insulator supporting a bus pipe exploded. Fortunately there were no injuries. The crew last week on 6/3/97 did some heat testing and sound fuzzing and found no problem. After looking at the broken insulator on the ground, it appers that the insulator was cracked. Where the cracks were, there was moss on the edges with dark discolor. On the other side of the break it was clean. Some of the places that the insulator contacted did some minor damage, scraped paint from the breaker cabinet, small chunk from the cement pad. Had this hit the wireman, it would have caused some serious injuries. The explosion was a phase to ground and a phase to phase.