Pole bases

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hillbilly1

Senior Member
Location
North Georgia mountains
Occupation
Owner/electrical contractor
I went to lunch today at a well known country style restaurant, and noticed two pole lights laying down behind the curb. After closer inspection, the bases on both poles were uprooted and laying on top of the ground. Atlanta had high winds this week, so that must have toppled them. They were buried less than 2' deep with 40' steel poles with single heads on them! The restaurant is less than two years old. It's scary to think that somebody is cutting corners this bad. The dirt they were in was also just loose backfill. I have pictures, but I forgot and left the camera on one megapixel, so it's too large of a file to post here. I don't know if anyboby got hurt, or if any vehicles were damaged, but it looked like they fell over just behind the curb, parrallel to the parking spaces.
 
If you use Photobucket to post images, you can choose to reduce the image size when you upload them. Right under where you choose the files to upload, there's several choices to reduce the images to (160x120, 640x480, etc)
 
On the Oregon Coast we get a lot of high winds - our inspector is pretty thorough on pole lights. If you just stick them in dirt they have to be buried some certain amount of feet depending on their overall height... but the vast majority are mounted to concrete pedestals with four or more embedded J bolts and hex nuts holding them on.

I haven't repaired very many wind-toppled pole lights, but I've worked on plenty of vehicle-toppled pole lights.

Is there anything regarding pole lights in the NEC?
 
Two years old and the contractor was taking shortcuts.. If I was the owner that EC would be getting a letter from my lawyer.
 
i627.photobucket

Lets try this again, I think I have it figured out now. Both pole bases looked like this!
 
I am sure the EC will want to fix this rather than get sued and a letter in his file at licensing board. Hope they are smart enough to get all of them fixed and not just the 2.
I set 40 footers in a 6 foot hole but then all we have is sand.
 
Somewhere I have pics of 2, 1000 watt fixtures on a twenty foot pole that rusted and landed squarely on a new Lexus.

Good times
 
Geez, the concrete and everything.

The last place I put up a pole light was at a State Police station where someone was backing up a boat trailer and knocked over the old pole. We had an excavator come out and dig us a 6 or 7 foot deep hole, then threw a piece of Soni-Tube in there, with a simple rebar frame and everything. All in all there was 6 or 7 feet of footing underground, plus 4 feet above grade (so vehicles run into the base instead of the pole). The pole kit itself included 4 big ol' threaded J-bolts to embed in the concrete. They were about 24" long or so.

And I got to practice my concrete finishing! :D

The point is, though, just about every place gets high winds sooner or later. Every winter here we get a couple of pretty nasty storms and every day immediately after, our shop phone rings off the hook with people that had their services ripped off their house from a falling tree or pole. Can't do anything about the trees but we can do something about the poles.
 
This is what our nice local utility did to one of our customers, cut the parking lot feed, threw it back in the hole, covered it up, and didn't bother to tell anybody. When the customer figured out that pole didn't work (far end of parking lot) It had already been paved over. My Al's name is Matthew! Didn't get a picture of him in the ditch though. I had utility protection mark it, but there was no warning tape anywhere above it. Getting back on topic Waffle House usually does their own pole bases, about 3' deep, but wide at the bottom below the sonotube. Their poles are only 20 footers too. All of the bases for the 40 foot poles I have done always been 8 foot deep. I have seen them snapped off at ground level because the installer did not bring the rebar up near the top of base.
HPIM0336.jpg
 
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