Dixie,
The salt and sun down here takes the paint off cars and rusts everything metal outdoors quickly. I went through a couple sets of lawn furniture before I wised up and bought an aluminum set.
Crap I meant to quote the whole post and somehow deleted half of it.
Yes the salt spray is horrible for any linemen in Florida. It makes a fairly easy job of say transferring 3-phase from an old pole to a new one very dangerous. Old copper lines get brittle without the salt spray, but with it the job becomes 10x more dangerous. Sometimes just shaking the line can cause it to break because it's so brittle and it's impossible to move a phase without it shaking. It also eats away all the material (steel arms, dead end shoes, etc.) on the pole as well and will eat the pole ground up and make the ground worthless. Trust me, you don't want a phase breaking in your possession either
Here is what happens when you "break the load":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yX5TIDLvMywSo when the power company wants to have an outage now you know why. It makes everything totally safe when it's dead.
