Göppingen now even has redundant power supply in OSM since I closed the gap in the 110 kV line from Hattenhofen to Bezgenriet. Via Kirchheim and Eislingen, Göppingen now has a second connection to the power grid.

The third connection runs, with a little guesswork from the abbreviations WAD and SHO, to the North via Waldhausen and Schorndorf in the Remstal. It's going to take quite a while to complete this as Waldhausen is about 20 km from the next mapped power line and I haven't even reached Waldhausen yet. Hopefully somebody will jump in to help but I know that I have a pretty special interest. (What I don't understand though is why so many more people find it interesting to turn around every stone and dead piece of wood at some given point somewhere to find a plastic box full of trash. ;-) )

Talking of redundant power supply and bringing me to the headline: On the weekend, I watched a part of one of these "Watch me, I'm spectacular"-type TV shows. It was called "The 10 toughest jobs in the world". (First rank were the fire jumpers who parachute off planes in the south-west USA to put out fires in the wilderness.)
Rank 3 were the "power cowboys" in the USA. These guys climb from a helicopter to the power line WHILE THERE IS POWER ON IT! The speaker said the lines ran up to 345 000 Volts. They wear a special suit with metal wires in the garment to make the current flow on the outside of the suit and not through the body. First they need to hook a pole up to the line to create equal potential between the helicopter and the line. You can see the electric arc when the hook comes close to the line. Then the guy climbs onto the cable (which consists of three or four individual wires, see the tag wires= in OSM :-) ) and walks to the power pylon. He is only almost crazy (for getting on the live line in the first place) but not totally so he has a safety rope in case he slips off the line. At the pylon, he checks if any of the clamps holding the wires has become loose from the 60 Hz vibrations that the AC creates in the lines and tightens them again. Finally, he needs to walk away from the pylon far enough so that the heli can pick him up again. This is so exhausting that he needs to take breaks in between.
The speaker said they need to do this on those lines in the USA that are the only line supplying a city or region. He also said that this job was quite well paid. Well, I wouldn't have guessed that. ;-)
In Germany they always switch off the line if they work on it. Or else I would have heard of the power cowboys of Germany before. They can because of - yes, you got it right - the redundant layout of the power grid.
There's one thing that made me think though: This is pretty complicated so I can't imagine they do this for routine checks. First thing is these guys have to check at least three phases per pylon. For each one, they need to repeat the whole procedure that I described above - they surely can't jump from one cable to the other. Plus they would have shown that in the report. So I'm quite sure they only go up if they have located a problem (probably by listening to the vibrations) from the ground.