1990-1996 followed by 1 year still living in Troy but working in Schenectady.
-Blast

Sue, an energized powerline is "typically" dancing and sparking. Phone lines, unless it's a major line are a smaller diameter and just lay there. Personally and our dept standard practice is to treat all down lines as enegergized. We just keep people away and wait for the power company. This can make for very long waits.

I spent a lot of time in the old Rathskeller back in 90-91 when my then GF was attending RPI. If I remember right she was a biochem major.

Send in an attorney to test it.

All joking aside, a phone line can be energized with dangerous current if one end of it fell onto a power line or if a power line fell onto it. While energized lines often dance and spark, they don't always. Your best move is to treat all downed lines as energized and call 911.

I was teaching freshman chem lab that year, she was probably a student of mine. Small world!
-Blast

I don't know Izzy. I work for a cable company and our techs are not allowed to use metal ladders because of the threat of electricity. There may be more at play but I'd never take the chance. I recall hearing somethin about older phones drawing their poer directly from the phone lines?

Good advice, even worse a line that may not at that moment be hot can be quickly energized without any apparent human intervention. Power company software is designed to send a current through a problem line at certain intervals to see if a transformer can be reset remotely or to confirm an open circuit issue.

Thus, a line which may have been "safe" a second ago, is suddenly energized now.

Easy way to tell a phone line from power line is to look for insulators (phone line won't have the big ones that power lines do).
Regardless, stay away from them. A lot of people don't realize that you don't have to touch a downed line to be killed by it. If it is live, and touching the ground, it can charge the ground, and the level of charge increases the closer you get to the line. Take a step towards the line with both feet on the ground, the foot closer to the line is at a higher potential (voltage) than the other foot, so now your body is completing a circuit.

The situation up there now reminds of 2004 when Frances and Ivan went through the southern appalachians, although I haven't seen much from Irene obviously. I was in school at Clemson, and I remember driving through the mountains afterwards, and it was unreal how much damage was done. Lots of tornadoes, blowdowns all over, landslides, bridges damaged, and pretty much every river and creek flooded. Actually got to see the Chattooga during its record flood from Ivan, unreal how much water was flowing, and how fast it was moving.

So, update for anyone who cares....

First, thanks to Illinois- our Guard Blackhawks are still in shipping back from their latest deployment, the crews literally landed in Jersey yesterday, so we're borrowing some H-60s and a few, big, beautiful Chinooks, plus flight and ground crews. We've got power crews from Maine and Illinois coming in as well, and the private helos in Vermont are all assisting.

Local heavy equipment owners and operators showing up with their machinery and asking where they need to be, but that is to be expected in a town where the only way we get things done in most towns is volunteers.

Almost all towns are now accessible. By horseback, foot, ATV, dirt and mountain bike, or Guard Hummers in some cases, but there are water, food, fuel and medical supplies getting in. But there are still places where we can't get large trucks to bring in efficient load sizes and most passenger vehicles can't get out. For the few places where even by hoof and by boot you can't do it, helicopter resupply is running.

The number of the missing is going up, but not by a few.

There is question about the safety of personal garden crops that were flooded, citing sewage and petro chem contamination. We are starting to get more word on farm damage, doesn't sound so good for crops- we'll be buying a lot of feed this winter. Lot of small businesses may be done as well.

And we are testing something new with Google, a faster to update and more useful map for the Department of Transportation. Still adding the local roads and small bridges, but considering it didn't exist 100 hours ago it's a pretty good start. http://511.vermont.gov/main.jsf

The big thing I'm not seeing is drop points for supplies. Me and Matt got off light, the Burlington area mostly got inconvenienced unless you looking at a farm. There is a part of me who wants to share the pain with my neighbors.

WOW! It looks like practically the entire state is affected!

I suspect it is much worse than the rest of us can even imagine.

Sue