some story on a broken pole !!

For sure, you have noticed broken poles at terraces of building – in our places, we use them to tie ropes and dry clothes daily .. .. some are made of bamboo, sometimes they are iron poles fixed to the walls – one such pole, a broken one at that – and do you notice anything interesting in this pole in my neighbourhood !  

Not many of us observed and few of us would have appreciated the Corporation workers / Electricity workers  – especially after rain – more so after cyclones .. .. trees would have fallen, electric poles uprooted .. .. and some make calls – and post comments that in our Nation, things do not happen !  .. .. but on the streets, these unsung heroes would stand in rain, sometimes in knee-deep water, risking their lives – remove obstacles and work for restoration of lines !  .. ..

Perhaps things are different in some countries – when the crew of electrical workers pulled up to Camp Villere Road in Slidell, Louisiana, its members marveled at the three-dimensional puzzle Hurricane Ida had posed: a power pole knocked to the ground, a dozen shattered cross-arms and 90-foot trees uprooted and lying across the lines. Then there were the ticks – and maybe the alligators.  The linemen from Louisville Gas & Electric in Kentucky and other forces combined in rescue works.  Ida’s floodwaters and 150 mile-per-hour winds wrought widespread damage to the electrical grid, with almost 2,500 poles damaged and over 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) of transmission lines taken out, according to Entergy Corp., the biggest power company in the area. Each of the eight high-voltage lines that carry power into New Orleans and the surrounding area were knocked out – the workers there are better paid, have better equipments and in general do a professional job !

There is another pole – a Sports one at that – the pole-vault event.  With the year Katie Nageotte has had, she perhaps should have anticipated that her performance in the Olympic women's pole vault final would be an adventure. Nageotte missed her first two attempts at the opening height, 4.50 meters (15 feet, 9.25 inches). One more miss and she'd be done, a no-height in her first Olympic final. She cleared it on her third try. It took few minutes  to find her rhythm, but once Nageotte did she vaulted herself into a gold medal. The Ohio native was the only woman in the competition to clear 4.90m (16-1), making her the fourth American female track athlete to win gold at these Games and the third American woman to win pole vault since it was introduced at the Olympics in 2000.

"During my warmup, my quad on my takeoff leg was really tight, like grabbing tight, and so it took more trips down the runway just to warm it up," Nageotte said. "So my warmups were not great and I think that kind of went into my first couple of attempts. But once I got going …" Nageotte contracted COVID-19 earlier this year. She said it was a mild case but it did fog up her brain a bit, which affected her ability to practice.  Then in May, she arrived at a meet only to discover that all of her fiberglass poles for vaulting had snapped in half en route. That turned out to be a good thing in the end; after trying poles borrowed from several manufacturers, she found one she loves and continues to use now. And then there was early July, when she suffered through a pretty bad bout of food poisoning which derailed what was supposed to be an intense period of practice before heading to Tokyo.

This is no post on Olympics or pole-vaults, but the pole nearer my home – and to say that this bird was putting itself inside and was almost hidden, playing ‘peekaboo’ and chanced to capture it too !

With regards – S. Sampathkumar
3^rd Sept. 2021.