[Antennas] Ground Conductivity

[Hue Miller]

I was told this about one of the towns I service
as inside telecom worker: a power line - not sure 
how high voltage - fell to the ground. It landed over
a buried telephone cable about 3 foot deep. It
didn't damage the line under the place it dropped,
but at a box a couple hundred feet away, a 
several-pair splice was burned. In the opposite
direction, toward the telco central office 1500 
feet away, a fuse was burned out and a circuit
card died. I wouldn't have thought there would
be much of a voltage spike left undissipated at
the 3 foot depth of the cable. The earth up here
in this western Oregon valley has pretty good
conductivity. I wondered whether the same 
thing would have happened in some dry rocky
soil like maybe Arizona. -Hue Miller